Daily Archives: July 30, 2018
Held Hostage By Duolingo . . .
And I paid the ransom too.
We’re still waiting for the last two house offers to come in, hopefully in the next day or so.
I thought I might have another possible buyer today, but it didn’t work out. My client gave me an ad card for another local company that buys houses, so I gave them a call.
They sounded very interested and kept me on the phone for almost 30 minutes giving them info on the house, and finally setting up an appointment for Thursday afternoon at 2pm.
Then on my way home I got a text asking me to call back to discuss what they could pay for the house. I thought that’s what they would decide after they looked at the house on Thursday. But I gave them a call when I got home.
The young lady said that she had turned over my info to the property buyer, the guy who would be checking out the house on Thursday. She said he told her that he was presently paying $75,000 to $125,000 for houses in our area, and would that be a price range that I could live with?
I told her that since I had offers for $137,000, $139,000, and $140,000, what did she think? After she was quiet for about 10 seconds, she said, “Oh, I guess not.” Then she said that she would cancel the appointment.
Now I’m not sure what was going on, but I really doubt he’s bought any house in our subdivision for $125,000, much less $75,000. But at least they didn’t waste my time.
The high bidder sent me a copy of the contract we will be using if we go forward with the deal, already filled in, so I can look it over. I was glad to see it was the standard Texas Real Estate Commission 10 page form, and not some in-house version with a lot of possible gotchas.
It now looks like I got off easy on my GPS problem. As I mentioned the other day, the new power cord did not fix my problem of the unit constantly rebooting. So I started looking at replacements units on Amazon.
Googling had told me that sometimes the problem could be caused by a bad update, but I hadn’t updated recently so I didn’t think that was the cause. And anyway, to fix it, you have to save all your data off, do a factory reset, and then spend a couple of days downloading all the new updates, and then load your data back on. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, especially since I was kind of looking for an excuse to get a new one anyway.
But Friday, while I had the GPS plugged into my laptop to download the latest copy of my Favorites from the unit, I saw that a new update was available, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
And it fixed the problem!
It worked perfectly all the way up and back to Brandi’s on Saturday, and then again to and from work today.
Readers will remember that I’ve been refreshing the Spanish I learned in South America as a teenager using the Duolingo app, and I’ve done my lessons for 203 days straight without a missed one. At least until last Friday.
Or so Duolingo said.
I actually did my lessons Friday at work while I was waiting for a backup to finish, and everything seemed to be fine. Since Day One, I’ve always logged my Streak Total, i.e. 203 Days, the lessons I did for that day, i.e. Lessons 13, 14, and 15, of Adverbs, Level 2, and my Lingot total. Lingots are awards you receive for lesson completion and extra credit.
Then Saturday afternoon I decided to do that day’s lessons while we were Landon-sitting at Brandi’s, and as soon as I started the app, I was told that since I didn’t do Friday’s lessons, I had lost my 203 day streak.
WTH!!
And when I checked my Streak total, it said ‘0’, and it said I had not completed lessons 13, 14, and 15. But my Lingot total was correct. So I can only assume that something happened on their end to lose partially lose my stats.
However I was offered the Once A Month chance to regain my Streak for the small sum of $13.99 plus tax. And after fuming for awhile I paid the ransom and got my Streak back.
Hope they don’t make a habit of this
Thought for the Day:
If there is anything worse than a big bureaucrat – it’s a small, petty one given power.
ghdgh
