This Thanksgiving has been the best holiday ever and the beginning of a new set of traditions.
The script has been flipped.
Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned:
Forgive the cliché, but friends are truly the family you choose.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R F·O·U·R
Lucky Nineteen
Eighteen places.
Since I graduated from high school and moved out of my family’s house, I’ve lived eighteen different places. That means I’ve moved eighteen times in twenty-five years. Gypsies don’t move that much, nor do carnies, nomads, or Deadheads. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
That’s eighteen bedrooms.
Eighteen bathrooms.
Eighteen rounds of scouring stoves and wiping cabinets so I can get back my security deposit. No wonder I’ve had such a hard time trying to grow up. How the hell am I supposed to establish roots and mature when I move on to the next joint every 1.38 years? That’s barely enough time to have my magazine subscriptions forwarded!
However, that’s all about to change because Fletch and I are planning to buy a home!
For the past year and a half, our intention has been to buy the place we’ve been renting in the city because it’s nicely sized, it boasts lovely finishes, and is Stacey-adjacent. Also? We’re already here and the notion of boxing up all my shit one more time makes me weak in the knees.
Of course, now that we’ve finally saved up enough for a down payment, we wonder if we really want to do business with our landlord. Our country’s stringent libel laws prevent me from coming right out and calling him the dirtbag I believe him to be, so I’ll share a few recent incidents so you may draw your own conclusion.
For example, not long ago we found a big orange violation sticker on our front gate saying that our water was going to be shut off if we didn’t cough up the five hundred dollars we owed in past-due bills immediately.
Um… we’re renters. According to the standard City of Chicago lease, we don’t have a water bill. That’s not our responsibility. And if we did have a water bill—which we don’t—how could it be five hundred dollars?! The average city water/sewage bill runs about fifteen dollars/month. [Not that I would advise it, but this is when it’s fortuitous to have ACCIDENTALLY opened someone else’s mail so you know this kind of shit.] At five hundred dollars, that would mean the water bill hadn’t been paid even once since this house was built almost three years ago.
After forty-five minutes spent on hold with the Chicago Department of Water Management… bingo. Confirmation. That’s three years of unpaid bills and we’ve only been here half that amount of time.
I quickly take care of what’s past due and deduct the amount off our rent because if I leave it for the landlord—for simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Dick—it will never get done. How do I know?
Because the same damn thing happened with our electricity.
Dick isn’t your prototypical slumlord, which is why all of this is so frustrating. He’s an Ivy League grad with an assload of higher education degrees and he really should know better. In fact, he’s a professional real estate speculator, so none of what happens next should be new to him.
When we moved in here in October of 2008, I attempted to establish electric service in my name. When I hadn’t received a bill in December, I started calling ComEd because I worried when we did finally receive one, it would be so huge I couldn’t pay it. As I’m fully versed in what it’s like to live without power, I’m anxious to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, so I call around for answers.
Turns out our place had never passed the final electrical inspection after being built because some junction box was placed in the wrong area. Until the house passed city inspection, a meter couldn’t be installed and thus an account couldn’t be established. The house had essentially been siphoning energy for free since it was built.
Yes. Let that sink in for a moment.
Stealing from the electrical grid.
Is that not some Dr. Evil/supervillain shit or what?
According to ComEd, they’d sent many, many letters to Dick trying to right this egregious wrong to no avail. We called him and he promised to take care of everything.
“Taking care of everything” resulted in Dick doing, well, dick for three months, as well as the first of the big orange cutoff stickers slapped on our front gate. Do you know how frustrating it is to finally have yourself together enough to keep the lights on only to almost lose them because of the guy whose mortgage we pay? ARGH.
From start to finish, the process of establishing an electric bill in my name took eight months. Oh, and when Dick’s moronic subcontractors finally moved the box to pass inspection, they cut the line to our alarm system. So, unbeknownst to us, from April until November our expensive radio-controlled system that we installed and paid for didn’t work. We found this out only when a battery needed to be changed and our landlord claimed he “couldn’t remember” the name of the alarm contractor who originally wired the house. Fortunately, we still had his card.
What’s interesting to note is the alarm contractor was very familiar with Dick’s name, due to over ten thousand dollars’ worth of unpaid invoices. And that’s when we decide that buying this house might result in too many more unpleasant surprises. At some point, someone’s going to send some guys (if you know what I mean) and I’d like to not be here when it happens.
A few years ago our plan was to buy a house in the North Shore suburbs but we never quite got there. We couldn’t decide which town we might like best and then, once
