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you'll be living at "the old Smith place, the one those out-of-towners bought" for decades.
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No, that's ME.
Fortunately, we have the advantage of also having been "that couple that ran the Watson ranch before they moved down here." Not to mention, when we first moved down, DH was working for a local feedlot.
Ie, we're cattle people, even if we aren't from this area specifically.
But, to Mr. Smith that owned the place before us as well as the issue of bad neighbors and assuming the best of people--
We actually bought it from some guy out of CO Springs who bought it from Smith. He never did anything with it, held it for 10 years or so and sold.
When we first came out here, you could see the tracks in and out of the drive. It was like a freeway. Turns out Bob Smith, the original owner's son (aged 70 now, and on the VFD with my hubby actually), was coming in and out pulling parts off the old combine and swather that were left on the place in the bone yard. We were planning on selling it for scrap to help build the house. But we told him it was OK to pull parts. We wanted to be neighborly and really it was an easy give.
One day, AFTER we moved out here, we were all gone for the day and came back to find the swather gone. Like loaded up and GONE. We were extremely irritated, to say the least. But, picking our battles, decided not to call the sheriff over something that was basically junk steel. Even if it was a
lot of junk steel.
However, once we strung our interior fences, it wasn't an easy slip-in-slip-out type of thing to get the combine, so he showed up at the house about 6 months later to ask about it.
"I need to get that combine out of there. I have a scrap buyer for it."
Acting like there was just some sort of confusion, I replied:
"Oh, that's OK, I think we've got someone found who'll haul it for us. Offered a decent price and all."
"But that's MY combine!!"
Again, feigning confusion:
"No, our sales agreement was pretty specific....all land and
everything upon it."
"But I had an agreement with the last guy that I could get my equipment!"
"Well yes, and he held the ground for 10 years before he got around to selling...but it's not a problem. We can hold off and let you do a title search. We aren't in any hurry."
Then, to rub salt in a little--
"We already sold the motor out of the combine, though. Do you know how much that thing brought??!!? $1900! to the feedlot Trap works for, to put in a front end loader.
But yeah, we can wait for the scrap guy while you run a title."
He blustered and blew a bit, "Well I don't want to cause trouble, but that's mine same as the swather was."
And just to drive the point a little more clearly I said, "Yeah, the swather. We were kind of irritated about that disappearing, particularly since you hadn't even talked to us. But we decided not to call the sheriff because we thought you might have been a bit confused about ownership..."
BS, of course. We knew he knew
exactly what he was doing. That's why he waited til no one was home.
"Well, I don't want to cause trouble..."
Of course not.
You just didn't want to be
caught causing trouble.
But instead I repeated,
"Truly, we aren't in a rush. We won't call the junk guy for a few more months. That'll give you plenty of time to do a title search. But let's not have anything just go missing again, because that almost looks like theft."
Win-win. We made it
abundantly clear that we didn't want anything else to disappear but we didn't have to be rude or mean about it.
75Likes
~*~Erin~*~
