You Think I Do WHAT? Vol. 7

Someone asks what I do. I tell them the truth.

“I’m a customs broker.”

And I watch their brain do the thing. Every single time.

It hears two words. One it has never encountered in its life — “customs.” And one it adores — “broker.” And it makes a snap executive decision about which to keep.

It keeps “broker.”

“Oh! Real estate?”

No.

But it’s too late. “Customs” evaporated somewhere over their left shoulder, and now, as far as this person is concerned, I sell houses.

“We’ve actually been thinking about listing—”

I’m a customs broker. I clear cargo. Ships. Ports. Federal entries.

“—right, so is now a good time, or…?”

Brenda. I have never sold a house. I would not know a comp if it staged itself in my living room.

Doesn’t matter. Broker is broker. Somewhere in the human brain there is a single folder labeled “broker,” and it contains exactly two things: houses, and — apparently — me.

By the end of the night I have somehow been added to a group text about a three-bed, two-bath on Zillow.

“Do you have the lockbox code?”
“What are the schools like over there?”
“Can you just run the numbers for us?”

I can absolutely run numbers, Brenda. I can run eight thousand lines of tariff numbers. Not one of them will tell you your mortgage payment.

Now, there are three letters after my name that could clear all this up. LCB. Licensed Customs Broker.

Nobody has ever, in the entire history of my career, correctly decoded them. I’ve gotten “Licensed… Business… something?” I’ve gotten “is that like an MBA?” One man confidently told his wife it stood for “Luxury Coastal Brokerage.” I let him have it. He seemed happy.

And that’s the part that actually breaks me. Because let me tell you about the two licenses we’re quietly comparing here.

The real estate exam — bless it — is, in a lot of states, a weekend course and a test you can pass on your phone in a parking lot. Click yes. Click no. Do you promise to be honest? (Yes.) Congratulations, you’re a Realtor.

The customs broker exam is a four-and-a-half-hour federal gauntlet with a pass rate that hovers right around “you cannot be serious.” It makes the bar exam look like a pop quiz you doodle through. It’s open book — they let you haul the entire federal tariff schedule into the room with you — and it does not help. It’s like being handed the ocean and told to go find one specific fish. By 4:30. In pencil. People with law degrees fail it. Twice. Three times.

I passed it.

And the universe took the single hardest licensing exam I could have possibly chosen — and decided it meant I could show you a lovely ranch with good bones.

So no. I am not a realtor. LCB does not stand for “Loves Closing Bungalows.”

It means I’m one of a few thousand people the federal government trusts to move the economy across the border without breaking the law.

But sure, Brenda. Let’s go see the split-level.