A beginning and an end.

A beginning and an end.

Those of you looking for your daily irony supplement would have found it on the front page of a recent Palo Alto Post: a laudatory article on Coldwell Banker's new downtown office local landmark gets sensitive renovation! juxtaposed with the trashy-even-by-Post-standards headline "He got in bed with the devil" over the tale of a local businessperson gone off the rails. Which is the kind of free publicity no local businessperson likes, even when his or her name is spelled correctly.

It rocked me, in part because I sit in that new office, in what I and my admiring cube mates agree is one of the choicer locations—I could have done even "better" and gotten packed like a hard-selling sardine into one of the two semi-private offices, but I knew my social skills weren't up to working cheek-by-jowl with other agents—but also because the local businessperson who reclined with the devil was in our office just long enough to find out that selling real estate is harder than it looks.

He's about my age, a bit older but doesn't look it. His photo, featured prominently on the front page of the Post, shows a fit guy with a winner's smile, although in person he looked a little frayed around the edges. Like me, he came from property management and, like me fourteen years ago, he found it hard sledding. Like me, he'd gone from big frog in a small pond to tadpole in a vast unfriendly ocean. I saw frustration, not unusual in a new agent, especially an older newbie bumped out of his comfy groove and private office, but I saw more than that. In fact, what I saw worried me: frustration ready to boil into rage.

So I gave him a pep talk whenever I saw him, not something I do, and chalked up his sullenness to a sense of entitlement. He was, after all, a golden boy out of Stanford, in his day the fastest man in college track. There's more irony for you: me, a guy who never made headlines, sports or otherwise, during his undistinguished career at Affordable State University, and who could barely run a mile without needing medical attention, bucking up a former star athlete from an elite university. He didn't seem to mind, however, maybe because I may have been the only one who acted like he cared.

"In bed with the devil" helpfully fleshed out the story I had only sensed, as did the ensuing office gossip. A decent guy, according to one of his victims, who fell in with shady characters. A guy whose wife left him, according to the gossip. A guy forced to sell his house quickly, per the scuttlebutt. A guy with an $800,000 civil judgment again him, at a time of life when most of us are thinking of retiring.

A guy facing twenty years in prison. If he serves his full sentence, he'll be 82 when he gets out. To what, I don't know.

Well, I'm a judgmental guy not given to outbursts of empathy, but when I see a story like this I can't help but bow my head and think, "there but for the grace of God". So it's probably good that I'm not a newspaper editor.