shelbinator.com

So I’m sitting on my couch on a grumpy Monday night, trying to relax with some prime time television after an hour and a half of cold-calling voters in this the final week of election season. Boy howdy, lemme tell you: I have found something less fun to do than canvassing, and it is phone banking. Odd that making telephone calls from the comfort of your friend’s apartment while drinking free beer is actually much, much more intimidating and buzz-killing than going door-to-door by myself in McMansion suburbia, but there it was. I’d rather spend every night this week on foot in Sandy Springs than go through one more call sheet like that. Those phone calls brought back a sense of dread that someone might actually pick up that I hadn’t experienced since, oh, calling a girl to ask her to my 8th grade prom or something. And back then I didn’t have beer!

I was all set to go to bed at a decent hour in a decent mood, but when I took the furball out for her last walk, I discovered a plastic bag hanging on my doorknob with (no, Ched, not another turd) a note from the landlord: Outstanding Balance.

Huh? I may not have filed my income taxes until October 16th this year, but I pay my rent every month. Lucky for me, there was a Tenant Ledger attached detailing my line item charges going back to May 2005. Apparently, I’ve owed them $14.47 for God-knows-what since at least that long ago, as that balance has been carrying over for the entire length of the ledger. This is news to me, and apparently news to the landlord, who’s just now getting around to pestering me about this randomly generated number.

Even more fun is the $50 “MTM fee” tacked on just this October 1st. A hand-written note helpfully informs me that “You can avoid the MTM fee by renewing your lease.” It seems I have now gone into a month-to-month situation with the rent, my lease having expired without a peep from the management. Now, it is true that I should have known as much as the management did that my lease ran through September (I’m only guessing - that sounds about right), but in my experience with five other property managers in three states over twelve years, they do this fun little thing every year where they send you, like, a notice that your lease is about to expire and it’s time to rectify that situation. My building went through a little management shakeup a few months ago, and apparently that kind of courtesy is not in the new management’s definition of customer service.

Judging by the fourteen other door-hangers I saw in our two buildings (39 units), it’s not just me. And I am actually one of the lucky ones: I hear that other people are looking at hundreds of dollars in back-charges, having been on a MTM lease without ever being told until now.

And I thought my frequently tepid showers were a problem.

The crap-icing on this ass-cake is that after billing me $50 on 10/1/06 and not telling me, the management charged me 15% of my outstanding balance (including the imaginary $14.47 from over a year ago) on 10/4/06. C’mon, even my credit card companies send me a bill before drilling me in the keister. And grace period? The friendly letter from the management urged me to settle my balance with the next month’s rent to “avoid additional fees and penalties.” Two whole days; what swell folks they are at BSM Investments.

BSM. That just sounds dirty.

The good news just keeps on coming. Last night I heard through the well-informed grapevine that the owner of the buildings got a wild hair to jack up the rent on all of us to the tune of $50-100/month. People are already starting to look for new places to live before these rumors are even confirmed in writing — but then, judging by BSM’s awesome powers of informativeness thus far, that’s probably a good idea.

This is so not what I need. I’ve got maybe six months before I’m signed, sealed, and delivered on a dissertation and then I’m strapping everything to that dying SUV and heading north. I am not moving into a cheaper apartment for six lousy months…but I also don’t feel like coughing up another $300-600 in the meantime to some guy whose properties are practically held together with duct tape. And if you’re part of the defense community, you’ll sympathize with the very next gripe on my mind: oh, damnit, not another address to register on my SF86. Seriously, I’m running out of references in this town.

I was positively livid on Monday night, though with the sleep deprivation and work stress on both fronts these days, it doesn’t take much buggery to set me off. I went through a couple drafts of a letter to the management before I toned it down to a version that my mother wouldn’t be mortified about, and I said a good number of mean and nasty things about our property manager who, as it turns out, is just as surprised about this as we are. “This is such bullshit!” I ranted to my friend across the alley. “Those ******* ******* are ******* in for it. I’m not ****** around here, this ******* ***** is ******* ********** and I’m ******** going to ******** their ****** ****! Jesus! You know, they’re ***** with the ***** ****** wrong guy! I’m…I…I’ll…*******!”

“Are you done yet?”

“**** no I’m not ******* done! You know what? Oh — yes — here we go!”

And that’s when I totally nerded out. Oh my God did I nerd out. Faced with managerial injustice and filled with rage, I took a stand and fought back! And when nerds fight back, nerds buy websites!

Yeah. I know. You can shoot me now. But it was the only element of control I could salvage for my night so I could go to bed with a decent blood pressure. I’m tired of hearing everything through the grapevine; I often find out after the fact when something’s gone wrong in my domestic situation that I’m far from alone. Our landlord drops the ball all the time, apparently, but nobody makes a big stink about it because when it happens the first time to us, we brush it off as a fluke. I don’t know how to investigate legal action against crappy landlord practices, but I do know where to buy domain names and set up websites. I’m hoping that if all of the tenants know exactly how we’re getting shafted, we might be able to band together for some kind of collective bargaining leverage. Look at that, not even two years of Democratic politics and I’m already trying to unionize! Oh, my folks would be so unproud.

And now, I shall commence with wasting more time on the internet by looking for a cheap apartment.