Just Another Day

We bought a house today. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Like you walked into a shop, browsed through a couple of aisles, found something you liked, and whipped out your credit card. Actually, considering that we’ve only been in this State for a bit less than two weeks, it probably does look that simple, at least from the outside. But the fact is, our current home-buying venture was so front-loaded that it’s a wonder the whole thing didn’t tip forward onto its metaphorical face, and it serves as an excellent example of how doing something with style, precision and speed is usually just a matter of really good preparation…

And of selecting the right business partners, of course. In this particular case, I can’t take a lot of credit for the fact that 13 days into our time in Michigan we’ve already selected, made an offer on, inspected, agreed to terms and conditions, and closed escrow on a house; most of the heavy lifting was the work of two (or four) other people. First, of course, was our wonderful California-based Realtor team, Steve Smith and Martha Alonzo, who not only sold our house in Redondo Beach in a market where nothing seems to be selling, but also vetted Realtors here in Central Michigan to find us someone truly exceptional…

Second, Karen Fisher-Austin, our local Realtor (who is, in fact, truly exceptional), started sending us property listings two months ago, including pictures, comparable property information, and virtual tours. Starting with this small mountain of data, Angie and I spent several weeks pouring over the property listings for East Lansing, as well as looking around the neighborhood and surrounding areas on Google Earth and other sites. As a result, we arrived in town already knowing the dozen or so properties we wanted to visit, and were able to select one in just four days…

Most of the credit for our success has to go to my wife, who put her amazing abilities as a manager and administrator to work on this project, starting with the initial contact phone calls back in Redondo and following through to getting all of our documents together at the end of the close meeting today. Now I suppose I could ask for some credit in having the impulse that led to our meeting Martha, the gall to ask our California realty team for help finding an agent in the upper Midwest, or the good sense to have married somebody this amazing in the first place, but the fact is I’d have done all of it anyway; I’m just lucky that my emotional choices have worked out in so many other dimensions…

It has often been said that it’s better to be lucky than good, and goodness knows I’ve proven the truth of that more than once. But it is also commonly remarked that we make our own luck, and while it might look like in this case we were lucky to blow into town and fall directly into what we were looking for, the truth is that Angie and I have spent long days, difficult nights, and a week on the road getting to this place, and none of the things we’ve done are anything that another home buyer or seller (or pair of them, anyway) couldn’t have done…

Now, I’m not going to tell you that selling a house in a declining market like Los Angeles is easy; or that packing up a large house, arranging movers, contacting an agent in your new city, learning the terrain, finding a new home, purchasing a house, or moving in are necessarily easy. I am saying that even a task as complex, arbitrary and emotionally difficult as moving to a new city can be done with speed, efficiency, and style – provided you also have a good plan and the right people to help. If you need a good Realtor in LA or East Lansing I can refer you to one, and if you need a good plan, I can probably help walk you through the process. But if you need a partner as good as mine, you’re going to have to get your own…

Busted

There was a very funny story this week about a prep school principal in New York who was caught inflating his background accomplishments just a bit. It seems that this fellow was bragging to his father-in-law (who unfortunately happens to be his boss) about having been on the Canadian bicycling team that competed in the Barcelona Olympic Games. While the man in question was a competitive rider at that time, there is no indication he was ever on (or even tried out for) the Canadian Olympic Team. I suppose he figured that no one would check – Americans are notorious for paying zero attention to anyone else’s Olympic athletes, and this was years ago, anyway – but the father-in-law was so impressed he put the whole thing on the school’s biography web page…

Sure enough, someone decided to check, discovered the lie, and exposed it. Then the media got hold of it, it started spreading around the local papers and newscasts, it appeared on the Internet, and pretty soon everybody in the world knew (or could easily find out) that Mr. Durnford was unwise enough to forget that the membership of Olympic teams is a matter of public record and can easily be checked by anyone who wants to. In anyone else it might have been a minor embarrassment – the sort of thing that your in-laws keep bringing up to put you down, and your buddies rag on your for until the next embarrassing thing that one of you does distracts their attention. Unfortunately, as the Principal of a prestigious private academy, Mr. Durnford is a public figure, and is now going down in flames…

I’m sure he’ll be all right in the end; impersonating an Olympian is not a crime, and it’s not like he was under oath when he said it. A much more serious case came up when a student turned in a paper to a professor of my acquaintance in which the (20-year-old) pupil claimed to have known the (then) President of South Korea for over 35 years. The whole thing was obviously plagiarized, and the student had failed to edit out this personal comment from the veteran reporter who wrote the original essay. The fact that the professor was able to find the original essay on Google in less than three seconds (it was one of the first hits to come up) just made things worse – and prevented the Dean of the college in question from offering much mercy.

Then we have the curious case of the Food Network’s Robert Irvine, the celebrity chef who claimed to have worked on the cake for the Royal Wedding in 1981 (when he was 15) and cooked for kings and presidents (while never having done either). You could see this as the counterpoint, if you really wanted to, in that these deceptions held together long enough for Irvine to get his own series, but I must point out that they were exposed in the end, and any competent researcher could have debunked them right from the beginning using the same sort of Internet search..

My point here is that while not all puffery is going to result in public humiliation, destroy your career, get you thrown out of college (and probably disowned; the student’s parents did not get a refund on the tuition for the year that was voided off the student’s records) or have people all over the Internet (and therefore all over the world) calling you a careless dumbass, the days in which you can expect to make absurd statements of fact and have them go unchallenged is long gone. For all that the deception and fraud on the Internet has changed our world, the truth is out there, too – and it definitely cuts both ways…

Why Reference Checks are Important

The other day, one of my coworkers was complaining to me about how much he hates having to call people to check references on prospective employees. I was duly sympathetic, at least up to a point; the fact is that everyone hates to check references, and most people worry (as this fellow does) that the people you are calling will try to make the prospective employee you are calling about look better than they really are, for one reason or another. But I could not bring myself to agree with him when he denounced the entire process as a waste of time. As much as we all hate to do them, sometimes they can be an excellent way of avoiding stepping into something unpleasant.

A case in point came up a few weeks ago, with regard to a rash of several cases of fakery in the newspaper. There was a minor scandal surrounding the autobiography of a woman who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor (and had never even been to Europe), and a slightly larger scandal regarding the autobiography of a woman who claimed to have grown up in a foster South Los Angeles as drug runner and gang mascot (she grew up in an affluent neighborhood in the Valley and attended an exclusive private high school). Either of these stories could probably have been debunked with a very small amount of effort on the publisher’s part, and the failure to run even a cursory background check on either on will cost each publishing company a great deal of money and embarrassment. Neither one compares to the Robert Irvine scandal at the Food Network, however.

For those not familiar with the chef or his program, Robert Irvine is the star of the Food Network show “Dinner: Impossible” in which he attempts to complete various food preparation and cooking challenges with limited resources, time, equipment, supplies, and so on. It’s been a huge success, appealing to many viewers who would never consider watching an ordinary cooking show, and improving the Food Network’s prime-time ratings in many geographic and demographic areas. Part of this success is the reality-show atmosphere of the program; the suspense of whether Irvine will succeed in his “mission” and how he will meet and overcome the challenges involved. Some of it is the man himself; an impressive looking fellow who claims to have cooked for kings and presidents, worked on the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Lady Diana, been knighted by the Queen (and given a castle in Scotland), and earned various other military and professional honors.

Except, unfortunately, he isn’t any of the above. Robert Irvine isn’t a knight; he was not befriended by Prince Charles; he did not cook for any known Royal event or any White House banquet; the University he claims as his alma mater has no knowledge of him, and the chef who actually make the cake for the Royal Wedding has stated publicly that he never heard of Irvine until recently. This last denouncement is hardly surprising, considering that Irvine was born in 1965, and would have been 15 years old at the time of the Royal Wedding in 1981. Even if we are willing to concede that he was some kind of pastry savant, it seems unlikely that anyone would have hired him to work on a project of that importance before he could have gotten a driver’s license…

Why no one at the Food Network thought to check on any of these claims before giving the man his own show is a mystery, especially considering that this is not the first time the Network has had this problem. Last year the winner of their highly-publicized contest to recruit their next network star also ran aground when the probable winner turned out to have falsified his application to the contest (he claimed to have graduated from a culinary school, but had actually dropped out, and claimed to have served with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, but had been Stateside during his tour). The Network wound up having to go with one of the runners-up, instead, when a single telephone call to the school in question could have prevented the whole thing.

This is not to say that everyone who applies for a job with your company is a cheat, a liar, or even that they’ve padded their resume. I’m just saying that if someone claims to have been working on a world-class project when their birth certificate says they would still have been in middle school, it’s probably worth taking a moment to call and verify that…