Today I’m going to be optimistic. It may have snowed yesterday, but it’s still kinda spring (April showers, yo!). The trains may be awful, but they can only improve from here (because Cuomo wants to keep his job). A woman on my commute may have cussed out another person on the D and then started reading “What does the Bible Teach Us?”, but no one sat on or shoved me (Jesus would be so proud).
OK, maybe I’m still a little negative about the trains, but today was a good commute day overall, and the process of keeping the cars not-totally-disgusting was also featured in NY Today’s email blast.
If you’ve taken the subway home late at night, you’ve probably seen the track sweeping/vacuum cars, or the garbage hauling cars clearing the tracks. You may, like myself, have accidentally ended up in a station they were power-washing the platform with bleach. You’ve also, maybe without noticing, found yourself on cars in very different states of cleanliness. But you’ve probably never seen or even heard about the massive cleaning endeavor that happens once every 2.5 months.
In one of 13 facilities around the city, dirty subway cars are scrubbed top to bottom, an individual cleaner spending 3.5 hours scraping gum off seats; polishing the doors and poles; erasing graffiti with “Genie Wipes”; and killing the massive amounts of (mostly harmless) bacteria that call these cesspools home. Worth noting: they use Fabuloso, the cleaner also championed by my bodega The outside of the trains are pressure washed more often, once per month, so just because a train looks good on the outside doesn’t mean it’s clean inside!
As a horrifying thought experiment, can you even imagine the condition of the trains would be without this? From the adults who insist on eating fried rice en route, to the people throwing trash (or throwing up) on the floor, to the children who ooze germs on everything they touch, it would be next-level gross. It’s like if we didn’t have street cleaning — how many feet of garbage would cover my block? Maybe 25? Thanks, New York, for acknowledging how disgusting we are and helping us mediate it.
This real estate value is about this commercial:
This commercial bothered me immediately, because it completely misses the mark on an agent’s role. Yes, we should be helping you choose places to view, but that is far from the biggest job! We are supposed to help you GET the place you want. Nowadays, nearly all listings are available online and consumer searchable, especially sales, because a seller wants as many eyes on a property as possible in order to get the best price. Off-market listings are not entirely a thing of the past, but they’re rare, so the era of needing insider info is largely behind us.
There are plenty of reasons you shouldn’t just go with the first broker in the phonebook (are phonebooks still a thing?), but “they won’t show you what you really want” isn’t high on that list. It falls squarely behind “they won’t be professional,” “they won’t provide value; they’re just looking to make a commission,” “they won’t listen,” and, the very worst, “they dropped the ball putting in an offer/closing and I lost a place because of it.”
So definitely shop around and work with someone you trust, but also know that this commercial is silly and manipulative.