These packages tend to come with several screws, dowels and tiny parts and a lack of clarifying instructions on how to fit everything together. What starts as a fun challenge often ends up looking like a failed game of Tetris. Only people who hold Ph.Ds in architecture or engineering are capable of completing such a task.

Once my friend wrapped up her rant of self-criticism, I welcomed her to the human condition.

We are all part of it — the human experience; as such, we all mess up. Reflecting on my real estate career so far, I didn’t have to dig too deep into the past to recall my most recent blunder. After all, it was only a couple of days ago.

I had some clients coming in from another part of the country to find a home. They had sold their home in another state and needed to find a landing place in ours.

They were looking for a ranch-style home with plenty of land and water for their horses and they wanted to stay up north since much of their family resided there as well. Thus, we were limited to the available listings with property, in a specific price range, that included water rights and/or a well.

We had showings for properties within a 150-mile radius. I had set all the appointments, and we made a plan to meet at the first home at 8:30 a.m. I arranged my listing printout pages in order of the showings, as I usually do, and set out early.

I arrived at the first home at 8:25 and texted my clients, letting them know I was there. They texted back to tell me they were there as well. I didn’t see them. It then occurred to me that I had set the wrong listing printout on top and had gone to the second property in the queue instead of the first. They were 45 miles apart.

I panicked, then I punted.

I called the listing agent to see if she lived close by. It just so happened that she had gone to the property to take some aerials of the lot. She would be happy to show them around.

I called my clients and explained the situation and then found a place to park for the next hour or so until my clients made it to the second showing, where I was located. I would have pivoted and ran down to the first; however, by the time I would have got there, they would have been done.

Either way, we ended up going back to that one at the end of our showings and spending a good amount of time there, after which they decided to put in an offer on it.

If only that had been the first or last time my fallible humanness came into play. Alas, it was not.

There was the time when my client’s check for the earnest money he had just given me flew away from my fingertips when I walked outside and right into high wind conditions. We never found it. I paid to put a stop on the check and he wrote me another.

There was also the time when I told my client named Gary that I loved him. Gary happens to also be my husband’s name and that was to whom the text was intended. I was appreciably more cautious about my texting habits following that incident.

There was also the key incident. As there are many “key incidents” in my repertoire of misjudgments and errancies, I will specify. It was the coldest day in February, too cold to snow and too dark for even the moon and stars to be out.

I was just preparing to show the last home of the day, a vacant home that was bank-owned and had no utilities hooked up, thus no lights or heat.

I managed to finagle the key out of the key box located on the side of the home attached to the water meter only to have it immediately fall through my frozen fingers somewhere into the mounds of snow lying beneath.

I stood outside and searched fervently in 7 degrees Fahrenheit until my clients informed me that they really didn’t want to see the house anyway because they didn’t like the outside appearance.

I had to call the list agent to inform him I would be back in the morning to locate the key — after my fingers defrosted.

I’ve triggered house alarms, had the cops called on me, chased dogs who escaped, gone into the wrong house (see above, i.e. getting the cops called on me), got stuck in a small space behind the dryer in my attempt to see if it was gas or electric and knocked all the carefully aligned spices off a stove ledge checking for the same thing.

I’ve been peed on, bitten and jumped on by various dogs and have awoken, what I thought was a pile of blankets, in a “vacant” home.

As it turns out, I have a bad case of the human condition. However, in my defense, I wouldn’t even attempt to put together a “högdalen” by myself. I learned that lesson the first time.

Jen Fischer is an associate broker and Realtor. She can be reached at 801-645-2134 or jen@jen-fischer.com.