1st, discovered (lawyer) they can't kick you out in three days, you have thirty days. They can send the sheriff in with piece of paper, but, I was told, "you can ignore it."
I would not have known this had I not asked, and the guy who received the notice did not know this: now he has an apartment, utilities included in the rent.
Yay.
It bothered me -- it concerned me -- the hurt surprise and confusion on the guy's face face when he read it -- the little LIST of things he had done wrong which were supposed to be prompting the eviction (it's like a "one-two-punch" -- "You did this, and this and THIS!!"); I simply loathe seeing anyone subjected to that -- oh and my "favorite" part, the cowardice of the landlord (land"lady"?); she cannot tell him in a civil way, or just be nice & lie and tell him you have a relative you've got to rent the place out to, Sorry, but I have to help him, so I gotta ask you to move out, Sorry -- she could have done it smoothly but instead she chose, deliberately, to do it with a) accusations which were transparently trivial and b) an intimidation tactic, using law enforcement.
Stupid. Unnecessary. And paid for with my taxpayer dollars.
Think there are two issues at play here --
1. how does a landlord handle himself or herself, as a businessperson? and
2. there's a larger cultural change at work here -- it isn't just landlords, or this town, or this whatever -- wouldn't venture to speak for World but people everywhere are saying what I'm seeing: in our own country, at least, there's a trend toward certain kinds of behavior -- Angry, rude, combative -- when it's not Necessary (!) -- simply as a way of life, or a way of being.
--------------------
Item 2 is a whole topic unto itself.
Today, I was thinking about just touching the Landlord topic.
Because after this occurred the other day, and I was upset -- visited with a few people, and the Landlord stories started coming out of the woodword -- bing, bing, bing! Same kind of stuff...just weird. And in each of the five examples which I'm listing here, the landlord was a woman. (What's up with that?)
a sampling:
One man told me, "When we were first married, we rented from this lady -- she used to go into our apartment when we weren't there. Finally we set up a bottle -- rigged it up over the door -- not so it would hit the person, but so it would scare the shit out of 'em! " (with a big smile) -- and the next day, we came home and there was a note, complaining to us for having glass on the floor...!"
Three different people asked me, when I mentioned the last name of the guy's land-lady: "Was it J H----?" Three different people, just from hearing the last name - ! Evidently that lovely woman's reputation precedes her. (Perhaps precedes, follows, and surrounds her...!)
But this one wasn't her. It was a different H-------....
So there's three.
A beautiful girl who works here told me her landlord story -- when I tell something, I tend to want to offer backstory, some description, what I thought at the time before I learned the way it really was, and maybe a few colorful details and things I think will amuse the listener, or teach them something they ought to know about...
but this young lady's style is a little more succinct:
"Mine went into my house and took pictures of my kids while they were sleeping.
She's a bitch."
That's cutting to the chase.
And I had my own recollection of sitting at a luncheon several years back -- maybe around 02 or 03, and handing over the lead in the conversation to a woman I thought I knew well, and used to like, and then hearing her go on
and on
and on
and on
about a renter in one of her (and her husband's) buildings who was not going to be allowed, by this landlady who I'll call Person 7, to have the kind of pet she wanted. Either the renter wanted a dog but would only be allowed to have a cat, or it was the other way around, can't remember. On. And on. And on. And how she (Person 7, the landlord) was going to tell her, and that's just the way it was going to be, and --- blah blah More In That Vein --
and I thought I was going to die right there in that chair because this tedious discourse was never going to end.
And, worse, I realized I was in the presence of a creeping, growing, grasping Ego that was determined and desperate for Power And Control over something. Somebody.
Realized, thought I didn't want to, that having renters was just providing Person 7 with one more group of people for her to push around. And she was warmin' up to it.
It was repellent.
I felt sorry for her husband.
And now I'm thinking, "What is wrong with these ladies?" Do only horrible people become landlords? Is there some kind of Rule about that?
I rented for the first 9 years out of the college dorm, starting with sophomore year. Never had problems like that. In Boston, never saw the landlord or anyone who worked for them. It was like -- a company. Check in the envelope one a month, good-bye. You never even thought about your "landlord."
The idea that he (or she) might go into "my" apartment when I wasn't there and -- I don't know, look at my Bob Dylan albums, or read my diary, or frighten my cat -- never occurred to me. It was a non-issue.
But in this small town, some of these landlords are not huge businesspeople with Great Means and Far-Flung Investments. That one house, or those six buildings, represent a much bigger share of their net worth and hence their attention. And some of these ladies may not have actual careers, or full-time jobs -- THEN you've got --
a) time on your hands, and
b) a tiny little bit of perceived "power."
There's your lethal combination.
With some Discretionary Time,
these land-ladies could --
A) listen to Mozart and read great literature; or
B) pester and fuss, bully & spy -- on their renters.
And guess which option they pick??
-30-
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