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Lagniappe (lan yap)
An old Creole word for "something extra."
A Day in the Life
REAL ESTATE SCHOOL – Dallas, Fall 1996
In the mid 90’s, there were two classes that you had to take before taking the state real estate license exam, and I was taking them both at night at a local community college. This is a tale of one of them.
Our instructor put us in work groups for the semester. Each group would concentrate on one topic. We were to complete three special projects over the entire semester which would make up the bulk of our grades. Those three projects were: a research paper, an oral presentation in front of the class and the one that had everyone in disbelief - a video of each group making a mock presentation to a mock client. “We’re not actors.” “I don’t even own a video camera”. “Are you kidding?” Students started dropping out immediately and continued to drop out every week for several weeks.
My group was assigned “intermediary agency”, which in Texas, is a real estate company that works with both sellers and buyers. After a few weeks, there was only myself, “Joe” an unemployed restaurant worker, and “Al” an engineer and Vietnamese refugee. First things first, learn to pronounce “intermediary”, which proved to be quite a challenge for the uneducated Joe and for Al, whose first language was Vietnamese. I decided that we should concentrate on getting the work done and they could continue practicing their pronunciation. Al and I did most of the research, most of the work. We wanted a good grade and we knew that Joe would not be much help. He was a good guy and we liked him a lot, so we practiced with him over and over to prepare for our class presentation. We couldn’t even start thinking about the video yet.
The night of the presentation arrived, only a few minutes to coach them both on correctly pronouncing “intermediary”. They almost had it, I was so proud. We got up in front of the class and I began our report. Not too bad. Now it was Al’s turn. He was obviously knowledgeable about the subject, but was a bit difficult for others to understand. He struggled with “intermediary”, but otherwise gave a fine report. Now it was Joe’s turn. Al and I kept our fingers crossed and stood close enough to assist if he forgot what he was supposed to say. He was off to a pretty good start, he even pronounced “intermediary” correctly as he looked at me for assurance. I smiled and he went on. After a couple more minutes of his brief portion of our presentation he gained some confidence. That’s when it happened. As he spoke about how intermediaries could have a possible conflict of interest if they are representing both the seller and the buyer, he went on to say, “it’s all about the ethnics!” I stopped breathing. “Intermediaries have a potential ethnical issue in representing both”. My mouth dropped open. “Buyers and sellers aren’t always told about the ethnics.” He went on, it seemed like he said it a dozen times.
During the break, as I ran for a soda (wishing for a shot of tequila) one of our classmates who knew of my struggle with the pronunciation problem, stopped me. He said he wished he’d had a video camera for that. He said the look on my face was priceless. I don’t know whether it was red with embarrassment or white with horror, but it was probably every bit as funny as Joe’s presentation.
