The Lesser Evil

As you know, we submitted our paperwork to the corporate office of our (hopeful) new apartment complex for early approval with the intent to move in over the weekend before May 1st (that being this past weekend). Naturally, we had all of our plans laid out nicely; lease signing here, move-in here, happily ever after here. Just as naturally, the new complex went out of their way to satisfy our expectations that this would not happen.

Morgan, my fiancee, called the apartment complex last Tuesday to ask them if we had been approved yet. Monica (presumed spelling), the woman in charge of overseeing our application process, was not in the office. At all. All day. Perhaps she had pressing business. Do women in middle management play golf? The outcome was similar on Wednesday; maybe it was just a long game? Who knows.

Morgan called them on Thursday and finally got hold of Monica (flustered because she had got too much of a tan golfing) and asked her what was going on with the apartment. "Everything's fine," she said. "We're still waiting for approval from the complex." So Morgan said her goodbyes and hung up.

Now, before I go on, there is something you ought to know about Morgan and I. We have both worked retail positions for several years, and we're both quite familiar with what it's like to be caught in the crossfire by a customer who is irate with your company's poor management skills and directs that anger at us, the undeserving lackeys. Anyone who has worked retail knows what I'm talking about. However, the difference between Morgan and I is that this experience gives Morgan more patience and temperance in dealing with people, whereas I meaningfully seek out the cause of the botch and apply severe amounts of displeasure.

This is not to say that I call people up and yell at them; quite the contrary. You could say that I'm more like...assertively nice. I'm sticking to that story, no matter what Morgan tells you.

So when Morgan called me and told me what Monica told her, I decided to give them my own call and give them a piece of my mind. A very courteous piece of my mind. So I called them, spoke with Monica, and asked her what was going on. "Everything is fine," she said. "We're still waiting for approval from the complex."

"Okay," I said, and hung up, only to realize that I had gotten the same response Morgan had gotten. The next thing I said was simply, "D'oh!"

So, Morgan called on Friday and asked them what was going on. Now comes the fun part: "We're sorry," Monica said, "but we can't approve you until you fax us a copy of your son's birth certificate." Wait, what? Birth certificate? They already had his social security number. And why didn't they tell us this sooner? We've had his birth certificate in storage for weeks; in fact, it's one of the only documents we have yet to lose.

To make a long story short (too late), we were not given keys so we could move in over the weekend. We spent the weekend in a mad scramble moving almost all of our belongings into our two storage units, and only found out today (Monday, hurray) that we had been approved. Morgan quite literally just got off the phone with Monica, who told us that there were electrical problems in the apartment that needed to be repaired. We talked her into giving us our key, but she said we could sign our lease after the repairs were done. Our friends assure us that this is a good move on both our parts, but I am skeptical; I'm waiting for them to say the repairs are too big, that we don't have a lease protecting our right to be there, and that we have to leave.

Joy. Expect the worst, hope for the best, my motto goes on.

The Baby Walks At Midnight

For the past several months, we have been struggling to persuade our 18-month-old son to go to sleep at a decent hour. Our doctor told us this would be a difficult task, given the fact that we are living out of the common area of our apartment, and I am a night owl by nature. This week, our child has resorted to vampirism.

An average day starts for the sproglet and I when we awaken, sometimes shortly before noon but usually after, face our day with groggy grumbling shared between us, and go about our daily business. This for me consists of working on the web projects that are intended to bolster the family's income, while fending off the child, whose daily entertainment is, quite simply, "finding new ways to give daddy gray hairs".

This is followed by an afternoon nap, which I regulate heavily and he resists regulation of; if he does not sleep enough, he is cranky for the entire night. If he sleeps too much, he spends the rest of the night zooming around the house like a Japanese economy car on a shot of nitrous oxide, driven by an over-caffeinated and socially repressed businessman. Now, mind you, his elective is always the latter, and he is very good at persuading me to allow this to happen. When he naps, it is more like he enters into a catatonic state from which no sound, act of violence, or bodily jostling can awake him. Even the lure of an unattended computer keyboard is not enough to rouse him from his "standby" period.

As a result, we usually spend the rest of the evening experiencing The Child Who Wouldn't Quit Running. This is also accompanied by a light dose of The Child Who Pulls Things Until They Fall Down. On a good night, he falls asleep at midnight. On a bad night...

This has been a week of bad nights. The baby sleeps until a whopping 11 p.m., and awakens to discover that the whole night is ahead of him, and darnit, he wants to paint the town red. Or crayon the living room red; they've gotta start somewhere. So he stays up, even with all the lights out and one of us in a dead sleep, zooming around in the pitch dark, using his baby-vision to see obstacles that may in fact be fatal to incautious mommies and daddies.

The final result is this: he does not go to sleep until the sun is on the verge of poking its head above the horizon. Only then does he crawl onto the bed he shares with mommy, curls up, and goes to sleep like the delightful little angel (haha, sometimes my jokes make me laugh too) that he is.

A Smattering of Misfortunes

Conducting the first order of business, there is a Noreaster coming into our area, and this morning we were treated to our first evidence of its approach; half of the master bedroom is flooded. What boxes and belongings remained in that bedroom were redistributed into other parts of the apartment to protect them from water damage, and we managed to avert disaster, temporarily. We're holding out for both bedrooms to flood, forcing us to evacuate all of our last belongings, but we are torn: do we hope for the flood to cause extensive damages that will cost our complex more to repair, or do we hope for a peaceful and quiet rain shower?

I for one am not averse to a bit more inconvenience, in exchange for sweet, sweet retribution.

There was some good news this past week; we have not been disapproved outright for an apartment at a different complex, which is to say we're not sure if we've been approved, but they at least haven't called and laughed in our faces at our pathetic attempt to find a home. We spent the whole day Friday hounding them for the results on our background checks, and just before they closed their office they told us that everything checked out, and to come in the following week to "fill out paperwork".

"Great!" we thought, "that must mean our lease!" No, apparently not. Now that we have applied and not been refused, we'll be...applying again, as far as we understand it. So, reiterating my previous statement, we have not been refused, but it doesn't specifically seem that we have been accepted, either.

This is where the process hits another hitch: we were told we'd be able to move in before the end of the month, but now they are telling us we wouldn't be able to move in until the beginning of next month. Curious...this means that we will be expected to leave this apartment a day before we can get into the new one. While I'm sure the process will allow us to move in a few days sooner (we hope), it still makes things a bit tight. Will we have to find a place to move all of our things in the interim? We do not know.

"Justice is Not Found in a Courtroom"

When you think about eviction, you think about buck-toothed yokels or uneducated ghetto dwellers, or perhaps clowns pouring, distressed and unkempt, out of a small car. Here's a funny story about our eviction from our apartment. Names have been kept the same to expose both the innocent and not-so-innocent.

My fiancee, one-year-old son and I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Claymont, Delaware, at a complex named East Pointe Apartments. A month after we moved into the apartment, in June, we began having problems with water leakage. The entire floor from the outer wall to a couple feet out from that wall in the baby's room became a small lake every time it rained. We tried to be positive about it:

"Look honey, the nest of spiders living in the baby's closet drowned."

"And he looks so cute in his new galoshes!"

Over the next month, our bedroom also began to suffer; stains began to appear in the section of wall that represented the corner of the building, and those stains then bubbled out as the dry wall began to rot and grow mold. We beseeched the complex to fix the problem, because we feared for the health of our young son; we have family who has experienced problems with their health because of mold. They tore out the damaged wall, even dug up the earth around our foundation and put tar on as a sealant, but didn't fully repair the wall they'd torn out, and refused to respond to our complaints that damage was appearing in other locations.

As days, weeks, and ultimately months went by, nothing happened. We resorted to sleeping in the living room, for fear of tiny beasties floating around in the air of the bedroom, breeding and creating ecosystems, complex democracies, and - we imagine - their own little despotic slumlords. Finally, we were forced to take the law into our own hands. This is not to say that we donned our crime-fighting outfits (of which you know nothing about, if you value your life); we called Code Enforcement.

A nice man named Victor Morgan appeared at our door several days later, on one October morning, and strolled through our house to observe our complaints. We apologized profusely for the mess (we are not organized people at the best of times, and make no excuses, but without the use of half of our apartment we were at unrivaled levels of sloppiness), which he waved off in a friendly manner, and even played with our son a little bit. To us, in our depressed and anxious, defeated state, Victor was our first bastion of hope.

He looked at the place and he tsked several times to himself, and when he left he had a laundry list of citations against the complex, and his promise that he would testify on our behalf in court.

This was when I made my first big mistake: I wrote a letter to the complex, requesting that the citations be immediately remedied, and threatening legal action if there was no response in a timely manner. I probably shouldn't have included that leather glove with the letter, either. And the kiss of death upon hand delivery may also have been overboard.

Their immediate response was harsh. The so-called acting community manager, a woman named Sandy Masters, came to the apartment and walked through partway, then told us that our mess was unacceptable and refused to even look at the rest of the place - let alone the master bedroom and the torn out wall.

What followed over the next month was a number of letters. First, that we were being evicted because of the messiness in the apartment. Second, that we were being evicted because they didn't have suitable accommodations to relocate us to. Finally, the claim was filed due to non-payment of rent; that's right, they claimed that we hadn't paid our rent one month, and were evicting us for it. I like to imagine that Sandy Masters was sitting in an office walled with windows at the top of a tower made entirely of obsidian as she did this, and cackling as she strangled a puppy for each letter she signed. Again, this is largely the product of my imagination.

Several months went by where nothing happened, and we made our second mistake: we didn't order our bank statements, or copies of the fronts and backs of our checks. When the court date rolled around last week, we didn't have the information we needed to prove that we were current on our rent; we had every impression we were being evicted for the reasons in the letters we had received. Who could evict us for messiness and not having another place to put us, and after our complaint to boot? We were confident. We had a pro bono lawyer, Jane Evans, who was confident as well. There would be no losing this case, and our counter-suit would put our kid through college.

It was not until we held a pow wow with our lawyer outside the courtroom, and reviewed the statements my fiancee printed from her online banking webpage, that we discovered our third, and biggest mistake: every rent check we'd written since the eviction notice was sent was written out to the wrong complex, cashed by our complex, and then denied in their accounting ledgers. Did we have the backs of the checks to prove it with their stamps? No.

The case was disastrous. Sandy Masters sat at the witness stand and told every lie that her high-paid lawyer prompted her to tell, while we told nothing but the truth that destroyed us, and even our own lawyer was sighing and shaking her head by the end. The ruling by the judge was in the favor of the apartment complex, and the only comfort Jane Evans offered my fiancee as she cried in the empty courtroom afterwards was this frighteningly true statement: "justice is not found in a courtroom."