A long time ago, your host wrote about a woman he saw in a grocery store, who could say with a straight face "I only have 15 items" in her cart, when such was plainly false. Although he'd never met her before, and hasn't seen her since, he's pretty sure he's selling Chez SC to her sister, or maybe a cousin.
Let's clear up a legal point first. If you are a legal adult (the technical term is that you have reached the "age of majority"), and have not been declared incompetent by a court, then if you sign your name to a contract, it means you agree to the contract. In the case of a real estate transaction, you don't just sign -- you initial, and initial, and initial, and sign, and sign some more. If this seems a little overly emphatic, all will become clear momentarily.
In the case at hand, the buyer signed a contract with a 30-day escrow period (mathematically inclined readers may do the arithmetic with Friday as the 30th day). This means that she is obligated to have the sum total of the purchase price deposited in escrow by the 30th day, and not, say, the day after. We never met the woman to hold a gun to her head or otherwise coerce her, and she contacted our realtor 3 days before making her offer and having it accepted. So all in all, she will have been involved in this transaction for 33 days at the time of closing.
All this emphasis on 30 days ought to be raising a red flag by now for most readers. So here's the payoff. 10 days ago, SC received a call from his realtor, where she relayed 2 propositions with contradictory content. Somehow, she managed to miss that last issue. The propositions:
1) Before she knew she would be entering into a contract to purchase Chez SC, the buyer placed her down payment funds into a 30-day CD,
2) Said CD supposedly would not expire until the day after escrow was set to close.
So would we mind extending the close of escrow until the next business day, after Labor Day?
Most readers will have read those statements and performed a bit of temporal reasoning like so:
If t1 < t2, then (t1 + 30) < (t2 + 30). However, we have been told that in fact (t1 + 30) >= (t2 + 30). So since buyer says the consequent is false, but that the antecedent is true, then courtesy of the truth table for material implication, we know that the buyer's claim is that the whole implication is false. Unfortunately for the buyer, we assume an axiomization of arithmetic that says that the statement is true, which only leaves us the line in the table that says the antecedent is false, and therefore we must conclude that the buyer is full of it.
What, you didn't think about your preferred axiomization of arithmetic?
In any event, recognizing that the buyer was attempting to have a situation where she collected more interest and got SC and wife to pay for the privilege of enabling her to do so (courtesy of three days of prorated interest, association dues, and property taxes), your host responded by offering to allow the buyer to extend her escrow period, so long as she paid all costs associated with a later closing. Needless to say, she was angry.
We then received a call from our realtor a day later, informing us that by a miracle, the buyer had managed to convince her bank (which happens to be the same one that SC uses) to "let her out early" without any penalties, and by prorating the interest on the CD to account for a shorter period. Unfortunately, that's also not true, because banks can't let you out of CDs early, by law, without a penalty. Perhaps the truth is that she was hoping to roll her money into a shorter CD that nevertheless would have delayed the close, and backed out of that when it became obvious that we would not pay her for the privilege.
While your host started this blog 20 months ago hoping to demonstrate the use of "ideas...out of theoretical and applied linguistics", it really doesn't take a linguist, a philosopher or a mathematician to see through baloney like this. But it never ceases to amaze him to see how many people haven't figured that out for themselves.
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