Home sweet holy crap

Yesterday the missus and I spoke to our broker, as provided by The Corporation, about what our hopes and dreams for a New York apartment might be. These people charge roughly 4 thousand dollars to do this job, and it seems to be unavoidable if you want to find an apartment in New York City. Now, there are a lot of dubious ways to earn a buck in America…pulling your pants down on a street corner comes to mind. Oh, also…advertising. But this is truly a bottom feeder profession. It’s like the catfish of jobs…though catfish is a little easier to swallow. Regardless, it’s a service being provided to us free of charge by my new employer, so who are we to complain? So we slipped into an empty office and dialed her up.

She was a very nice, thorough sounding woman who obviously has dealt with people moving from other cities to New York in the past. She spent the first half hour of our conversation warning us about the size of apartments we’d be looking at. “Listen, you’re gonna be really bummed out after the first day. Like, it will be a dark moment in your lives once we’re finished. Crissy, you will cry. Kevin, you’ll question your existence on this earth. Then you too will weep” Though some of this may be slightly exaggerated, she really did tell Crissy she’d cry at the end of the day. “Everybody does,” she reassured us. “Just try to prepare yourself.”

So she ended the call by telling us that she’d send us some good sites to check out to get a ballpark idea of what we could get for our money. “Whatever you do, do NOT use Craig’s List,” she warned us. “They lie about the apartments.” They lie? People lie to each other in order to get what they want? Our Midwestern brains could scarcely comprehend this.

10 minutes later I was surfing the WW Interweb, checking out some of the types of places we could expect to tour in a couple weeks. When we told our agent our budget was 3k/month, the perfect silence that followed suggested that we were actually on mute while her entire office huddled around the phone, scream-laughing and wiping tears out of their eyes. After regaining her composure, she told us that it might be tough to find something nice in the areas we were hoping to live (SoHo, TriBeCa, Greenwich Village, West Village, Lower East Side) but that she’d do her best.

If what I saw on those websites is any indication, we’ll be living out of a Radio Flyer in Queens for $3500/ month. But it’s cool. Cause we’ll get our $9,000 security deposit back in 2012.