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I come from Indonesia, where like in most Asian countries, we negotiate almost everything before buying. In lots of cases this takes lots of time before a deal can be reached. Of course, it’s become a habit of many Asian people, and it carries over to when they’re older.

Yesterday, I mentioned that an offer was made to our condo unit.Well, today I’m gonna be talking about negotiating vs time wasting due to that offer :).

In buying and selling, of course there will always be negotiation about compensation, price and details. My problem is if one part of the negotiators try to lowball the other by making unreasonable demands and thus waste time for both sides. This promotes feelings of distrust and hostile intent. In such cases, negotiation becomes an act of war, where both sides try to destroy the other by getting a one sided deal.

This morning, the other agent presented the offer from the people interested in buying the unit, and it was so far below market value, it’s not even funny. Case in point: there is another unit for sale on the same floor as us, smaller and lacks a couple of features that our unit has such as in suite storage and outside the bedroom laundry. That condo is almost $20, 000 lower in price than ours. Consider that the offer these people made was $20, 000 BELOW THAT OTHER UNIT’s price. In essence, they’re making an offer for our unit at a price about $30, 000 below the market value.

I understand the need to negotiate better pricing, but in cases such as these, negotiating turns to time wasting, since we have to counter, then counter, then counter and so on. If it weren’t for the patience and advice of my wife and our agent, I wouldn’t have even dignified that offer with a counter, telling them to come back when they’re serious. I mean, can’t people realize that this is wasteful of time for both sides? The sheer idiocy of some people just escape my thinking. If the offer were reasonable, I would’ve countered with a lower price, but just for that insulting offer, I’d probably turn this into an act of war 🙂

Tags: Negotiating, Negotiation, Time Wasting

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Well, sadly our experimentation with The Cooler Zone has ended. It seems that none of us have the time to post quality articles there. So I’ve imported all the posts to this site, and from now on I’ll be posting just on this site.

It was fun while it lasted, thanks to Henry and Kurnia who contributed quite a bit to that blog.

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Well, our agent just confirmed that there’s an offer on the table for our condo. It’s quite interesting because so far there have been only 2 agents who’ve shown our place, and these people making the offer were the first ones who saw it. Talk about love at first sight 🙂

We’re gonna hear the offer tomorrow afternoon, fingers crossed for a good offer and quick sale.

Tags: Realty

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We went out to Casey’s Bar and Grill last night because we had a 2 for 1 dinner coupon, and it expired yesterday.

Ordered the 14 oz NY Steak with grilled portabello mushrooms, while my wife had the Rib n Wing combo. The food was delicious, steak tasted great (albeit, not as good as Ruth’s Chris 🙂 ), and ditto with the Ribs and Wings.

After that we decided to try out the Mile High Chocolate cake, which was awesome. By the end of the night, we were so full, it was hard to breathe. I’d recommend trying out Casey’s to anyone.

Tags: Casey’s

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Sometime last year, I read a joke about the EU union official language and thought it was quite hillarious. A few weeks back, somehow this joke kept creeping up in my head, and I was trying to remember what it was but couldn’t be bothered searching for it.

Suddenly, I got an email from my dad last week (didn’t tell him about this or anything… must be father – son connection 🙂 ) containing the joke. I just thought I’d post it here so I don’t have to keep on searching for it the next time I want to read about it.

European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the langua g is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Tags: European Union, Joke

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I’ve been having this semi – ingrown toe nail on my left foot for almost a year and a half now. It wasn’t really painful or anything and I always thought it would go away on its own, so in general I just ignored its presence.

Well, for the last few months, it’s really been bothering me, causing quite some pain at certain times. My doctor suggested to soak it in Epsom salts and warm water. It worked for quite awhile, but after the nail grew longer, it went back to being painful again.

So, I finally decided to make a call to the podiatrist nearby and get it checked out. The appointment was this morning, and I got there early, sat in a big huge chair with my feet up (quite comfortable :)). Never been to a podiatrist before, I didn’t know what to expect.

The specialist finally came in, and she took a look at the toenail, and confirmed that it was growing inward just a tiny bit, and also that it was starting to have an infection. She then proceeded to clean it up, pulling out the ingrown nail and cleaning the area. I must say, that it was a VERY VERY painful, as it caused an open wound and she was cleaning it with a metal object. For 5 – 10 minutes there, I was just grimmacing and trying not to scream from the pain.

At the end, my nail was filed and wrapped around a huge gauze (I have a white mummy-like wrap on my left big toe.. kinda funny looking at it :)). It’s gonna take a week to let the wound heal and then I need to use some cream to prevent more infections.

Man, just thought I’d warn anybody going to get an ingrown toenail fixed. It might hurt :). But all in all, I’m glad I did it because it already feels better by not having the nail sink in the toe itself.

Tags: Podiatrist, Ingrown Toenail

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For the last few days, I’ve been trying to find a quote to send all our packed stuff (clothing, books, photos etc.) to Jakarta via sea freight. The quotes are around the $1200 – $1700 range for 5 boxes of 18" x 18" x 22", door to door delivery. I’m not sure if that’s a good price or not, considering we could probably purchase everything in the box for that price 🙂 (I guess it’s still better than us trying to balance carrying 5 boxes and 3 luggages going back to Indo 🙂 ).

The most interesting part was that one company suggested I talk to Fedex. I always thought this wouldn’t be much help, thinking that air freight would cost a ton of money (I did the online quote, and it turned out to be almost $5000 !!!). But anyway, I called in and talked to a rep, and to my surprise, he brought the price down to about $1700, door to door delivery within 1 week!. A very interesting quote indeed. So, we’re still deciding on whether to send it Fedex or just try to get the cheapest sea freight shipment.

Next up, flight tickets 🙂

Tags: Fedex, Freight

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Man, just when everyone started feeling better (we were all taking turns getting the cold and cough), suddenly on Saturday, both our sons got sick. The older one kept on vomitting through the night and couldn’t eat or drink anything, and also had the fever, while the little one has a stuffy and runny nose.

We took them to the doctor on Sunday, and apparently there’s no infection in either of them, but needed to monitor their temperatures. I’m not too worried about our baby because it just looks like the common cold, but our older son keeps saying his tummy hurts. I know it’s probably the stomach flu and he’s hungry from not eating for 2 days, but just worried that it might be appendicitis. So, we’ll see if he still complains about his stomach this afternoon, if so I might need to take him to his pediatrician.

Oh boy, the joys of having 2 kids 🙂

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The more I learn about Mississauga’s Mayor, Hazel Mccallion, the more respect I have for her. I mean, how many 85 year old women mayors in the world are there? And even further, how many are healthy, active, tough, and taking care of almost 1 million citizens in her area?

Well, yesterday, she also proved how much her constituents respect her. She commanded a person ready to kill himself to come down from his roof. You know what? The police have been trying for a couple of hours to get this guy down with no results, but when the mayor came and told him to come down, he didn’t ask questions or resisted, he obeyed straight away, end of story. Now that’s what I call respect! [Link]

Tags: Hazel McCallion, Mississauga

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Hey everyone, since we’re trying to sell our condo, we need to get rid of lots of stuff to get it cleaned up. The items and pictures are listed at http://www.darrickrochili.com/movingsale .

Please feel free to contact me if there’s something you want that’s not listed, we might have it :).

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