It's a six-point why Heather needs to get the fuck out of this apartment complex countdown!
6. Our bathroom looks like the before picture on an Oxyclean commercial - AFTER it's been cleaned! Don't even ask me what it looks like before. It's going to be sentient any day now.
5. We pay more than almost every other apartment complex in the area charges and we don't get valet trash. In case you don't live in Florida and don't know what that is, I'll try to explain very quickly. In normal environments with normal weather and normal amounts of wildlife, there are generally a few dumpsters here and there throughout apartment complexes where you can bring your trash. It's only a hundred or so yards to the dumpster so whatever you're carrying, you'll make it. Here, there are raccoons and 230,305,118 species of insect lurking around which could get pretty out of control with normal dumpsters so there's only ONE dumpster which is enclosed and doubles as a trash compactor and is usually quite a walk, so most apartment complexes have trash cans disguised as welcoming benches for you and they send somebody around daily to pick it up. We don't have this, so there's a lot of hauling heavy leaking bags all the way to the other side of the complex.
4. There's a jackass Muscovy duck living here that chases and threatens me, Brother, Rock, and all our neighbors every time anyone has the audacity to try to check the mail.
3. Everything keeps breaking. Recently we had to go five days without the use of a fridge. I almost died a painful fast-food related death. It's amazing how many instant things require refrigerated ingredients. But, that I could have forgiven. The A/C constantly breaking is another story entirely. This is Florida. It's fucking HOT.
2. Whenever something breaks, they send their Denier In Chief right on over to chew me out about how it works just fine. Once he actually looked me in my shiny sweat-drenched face and told me the a/c was working perfectly and the big old "87" reading on the thermostat was an estimate. I ask him to close the door behind him because we have a crawling baby and he tells me that's my problem and I should look after him. I ask him to close the door quietly because the baby is taking a nap and he slams it even harder. I hate this fucker and he's ALWAYS HERE putting newly chewed wads of Doublemint gum on my fucking electrical components and telling me it was my fault for setting the thermostat so low (73).
1. I'm a patient woman. I've been living in apartment complexes my whole life. I know they're usually working with unreasonably low budgets set by some jerk living a million miles away that never answers his phone. I know that faraway jerk cares more about the resell value of the property than the residents and the local managers are usually pretty good people with their hands unfortunately tied and for all I know, Denier In Chief is the jerk's son in law or mom's best friend's recovering alcoholic nephew. Who knows. But what happened tonight threw me over. When I was pregnant with Giggles, I used to go to the apartment complex's gym to use the treadmill and get my workout in an air conditioned room almost daily. When he was born, I realized I couldn't bring Giggles with me because there was nowhere to put him so I paid for a membership at a very expensive gym with a daycare which was very worth it for a while until I was recently forced to cancel it in order to pay for school. I tried outdoor exercise but I'm allergic to all of Florida. So, I'm back to the complex gym. The first thing I noticed was that in the year or so since the last time I went there, the television has been removed from the gym and all the buttons have been plucked off of the treadmill. The treadmill's default speed is .5 mph and there is now no way to increase it. So that's out! But OKAY. Still patient! I had my iPod so I spent 45 minutes on the recumbent bike. I'm so pious. Then I left.
I didn't get any further than the pool's fence. Apparently, the apartment managers felt it was necessary to change the locks on the pool, which formerly opened to the same key I used to get into the gym, but did not feel it was necessary to notify the residents or give them new keys. The gate had been slightly open when I went in and I'm So Stupid closed it behind me. I was trapped for THIRTY FUCKING MINUTES. I used to jump pool fences all the time when I was like 16 but it turns out that's not so easy anymore after your body has been mined by two baby humans and you pay your own medical bills. I would almost get one leg over and then look at the ground six feet below and feel the fence wobbling under my unsteady out of shape forearms and see nothing but price tags and smiling x-ray technicians. I tried getting a chair over to the other side to step on but it was too low and anyway wasn't certain to hold my weight. I tried opening the window in the workout room and removing the screen but I couldn't do it without breaking something. I didn't want to explain myself to the cops.
Finally, a very kind neighbor came out to have a cigarette and I sent him to go get Rock who then explained to his fellow video game fiends that he had to go rescue his wife who was "apparently trapped somewhere." All I needed was a pair of shoulders to steady me that weren't attached to somebody who would sue if I threw out his back. Rock provided that. He got me over to the other side and into some shallow shrubbery which we then ran out of as quickly as possible once we realized there could be SNAKES and I'm free. Try to stop laughing.
And I'm going to fucking kill somebody at the apartment office tomorrow.
