Therapy Dogs, Suicide and Sacramento Real Estate

Therapy dogs are calming passengers at the Sacramento International Airport.

There are no safety guarantees in life and especially none in Sacramento real estate. For example, just when you think it’s safe to walk along the sidewalk in Los Angeles, a woman can fling herself out of a window with an intent to commit suicide and land on you. Will your insurance company try to assign contributory negligence to your claim because, in addition to looking ahead, and to the right and left, you neglected to look up at the sky?

This is a true story. A man was injured after a woman landed on him. She died. The woman jumped from the 11th floor of a hotel in Westchester and critically harmed a guy who was walking outside the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Los Angeles International Airport, according to this suicide story in the Los Angeles Times. I mean, I worry sometimes about meteorites slamming into the earth but now I might have to pause and consider the possibility of human bodies falling from the sky.

A few months ago while driving Highway 99 to list a few homes in Elk Grove that afternoon, something fell from one of the overpasses on top of my husband’s car and put a big hole in his windshield. It could have been a squirrel for all I know except it would probably have to have been a mummified squirrel because there was no blood and the object was hard. It freaked me out a little bit, and then I realized I wasn’t driving my own car, heh, heh. Just kidding. No, wait.

Dealing with freaky things and stress is part of life in Sacramento real estate, I’ve come to learn over the decades I’ve been in the business. You just never know what will happen. You can only respond accordingly and professionally. I’ve noticed for some people, and by people I mean buyer’s agents, it means yelling, exploding and alienating everybody in the transaction. That’s just never been my style, and maybe that’s why I’ve lasted for so long. I accept responsibilities for my own acts and expect others to accept responsibility for theirs, although it doesn’t work that way for the other side.

Some people really need to calm down. I see they are also bringing volunteer therapy dogs to the Sacramento International Airport to calm passengers waiting in the terminal. It’s called the Boarding Area Relaxation Corps or BARC. The dogs are trained and brought to the airport by the Lend a Heart organization. They wear cute little vests that read: PET ME. It’s a good thing the dogs are wearing the vests because otherwise you wouldn’t know if they were a guide dog, and you can’t pet those kinds of dogs or their owners will bite you. I’ve tried, which is how I know this.

If only they could bring therapy dogs to a Sacramento real estate closing.