Have you ever tried to rent out your house? I mean the actual house you are actually living in at the time, because you can't move out to ANOTHER house until you find a renter for your current one?

No?

It's a thrill and a half.

First, you go out and purchase FOR RENT signs to stick in your yard among all the dead grass from the incestuous, unrelenting Mojave Desert heat wave that has attacked this part of the state for OVER A MONTH. Then you staple-gun another one to your back fence since you live next to a "major" road. Then you thank God that your husband bought said staple gun last year to put up Christmas lights because were it not for that, you would be forced to resort to trying (and failing) to nail the damn thing up.

Then you go inside and take approximately 4,563 pictures from every concievable angle of the inside your house, and two from the outside. Then you narrow them down to 5 and post them, along with an alarmingly exciting and upbeat description of your house, to include every possible positive detail that anyone could ever hope to know about any kind of house-like structure, on a rental property website. Then you sit back and wait for the offers to come pouring in like oil into the gulf.

The first few days go well. No less than two people have heard about/seen your house and want to see it. So you move on to the next step, which is to immediately panic upon the realization that you have no application for them to fill out if indeed they are interested, because you have never been a landlord before and have no idea where to find such a form. You Google "rental forms" and hit upon 546 sites related to the subject, 544 of which require that you pay a registration fee to access their precious forms, which must have been drawn up by Donald Trump himself for the amount of the registration fee required to utilize them. You finally hit upon a site which boasts "FREE!" membership for 30 days, figure you won't need it for longer than 30 days, register, and print off a rental application.

Then you look around your house and realize that it is completely trashed and smells like the inside of a cat litterbox mixed with putrified used gym towels and sour milk, and your potential renters are coming in two hours.

At this point, if you're like me, you run around in circles screaming your fool head off at everyone and everything possible to hurry and help get this place cleaned up or we're all gonna die! Chaos ensues.

Then you realize that you do not want your children present for such an inquisition (which is what it feels like) but that you have failed to make necessary arrangements for childcare, so you run over to your neighbor's house and beg and plead her to keep them for you for a few minutes, looking all the while like a rabid squirrel on crack because in the midst of all this mayhem, you have forgotten to take a shower. She mercifully agrees, so you then dash home and use half a container of deodorant and brush your teeth and twist your hair back into a sloppy bun (because there's no time to brush it) and fumigate the house with the air freshener you bought over a year ago.

Then you sit and wait.

And wait.

After fifteen minutes go by, you finally call the people, who halfheartedly apologize and say they got lost. They'll be here in ten minutes. Ok, fine.

They show up, they walk around, they love it, they want it, they'll take it. Problem is, they want it, like, TODAY. No can do, my good people, I need a week to move and another to get the new carpet in, since I'm not foolish enough to install it while my children and cats and dogs are actually still LIVING on it.

They take the app and leave and you never hear from them again.

Repeat entire process three times.

Never hear back from anyone.

Get discouraged. Get tired of frantically deep-cleaning house every time someone wants to see it, which is apporximately every other day. Wear out neighbors' good will for watching your wild children free of charge for 30+ minutes at a time.

Finally someone calls back and wants to know how quickly they can move in. They sound serious, so you drive around to Home Depot and Lowe's with all your monkeys howling and careening off in various directions, to find out exactly how quickly they can get new carpet installed. Call husband, who now must put together a lease. Call potential renters back, who decide they need to think about it.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

Make appointments to show the house to more people, who never show up and don't bother to call to tell you this. So you call them back and leave barely-civil messages for them telling them how much you appreciate them and their cowardly actions, after you've busted your butt cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and farming your children out time after time, all for nothing.

Get bitter.

Decide you are never buying another house again for as long as you live because this is utter bullshit.