Continuing the discussion from Oh No, please no … NOvember rants:
I’m starting with the miniest of mini-rants…
Literally as I am starting this thread I stepped into some water in front of my kitchen sink and I’m wearing socks. I hate the feeling of wet socks, especially when it’s not expected at all. Ugh!
… but if the last few months are any indication, some people will just continue to keep posting to the November rants for most of the month. Check your calendars, Doperinos!
Me? I’m okay… except that I had to spend the day alone in a darkened room with a splitting headache. Part sinuses, part migraine, but I wonder how much of it is the aftermath of having dozens of relatives packed into our teensy house for Turkey-and-Manhattans Day. From screaming babies and toddlers, to everyone else shouting at the nonagenarians, to eight cooks in a kitchen that only fits one.
The solitude today was blessèd…
Wet socks are the worst.
Here comes ranta claus!
Lol
I misplaced a credit card. I know it’s at home … someplace. Gaah! Time to paw through the pockets of recently washed pants, etc…
They are predicting 8 inches of snow. Not happy, worried.
Earlier this week I was working in close quarters with a power drill. The bit seized and it spun, hitting me in the mouth. After the shock wore off, I realized my front tooth was lying in the dirt beneath me.
Rant 1:
Thanksgiving was spent with a temporary crown - and lots of prohibitions about chewing. I had to cut up my stuff like a little kid and stuff it way back to chew it. First world probs I know… but this is getting old.
Rant 2:
My medigap dental insurance informed me that gosh and shucky-darn, your policy has a 1 -year gap before anything’s covered. So we’re paying everything out of pocket – or spend the rest of the year in pain.
Rant 3:
This is the second time this has happened to us. Dental policy no longer offered for the next year – forcing sign up to a new one which (drum roll) won’t cover anything for another year. Had to cover a lot of work for mizPullin last year due to the same issue.
I recently learned that my root canal from 15 years ago has gone wrong and needs to be redone. Of course now I’m on a Blue Cross Medicare Advantage plan and they only cover routine dental work and not root canals. There’s $2,000 I now won’t be spending on Christmas presents.
Heat- Again
I have previously posted about the heat in my new apartment. When I returned home from a day out with the woman I love, it was sixty nine degrees in my apartment. On Friday night, the outside temperatue dropped below freezing for the first time this winter It was supposed to be even colder Saturday night. I checked the radiators in my living room and hallway. The one in the hallway was set to MED. I was surprised to see the one in the living room was on Lo. I turned it to MED before I went to bed. I was curious to see how much warmer my place would be when I woke up.
The temperature went down eight degrees during the night.
When I got home yesterday, I also had a chat with another resident. I asked if he knew how the radiators worked. He did not know and said that one of them did not turn at all unless it was turned to Hi. I asked if the building prohibitted space heaters. He said that he had never heard of them doing so and to read my lease.
I read my police a few times since I moved in. There is not a word about space heaters. I think this is the entire lease. With my first place, there was a lengthy lease about dates, rent, late fees, damages etc. There was an even longer lease rider about quiet hours, laundry rooms, guests, leaving things in hallways or other common areas etc. That lease said nothing about space heaters. However, the lease rider made it abundantly clear that any and all space heaters were strictly forbidden. If managemen found out you had been using a space heater, it was grounds for eviction.
I am hesitant, for various reasons, to reach out to management for information and verification. My beloved told me that she has a space heater with a built in thermostat. She said she would give it to me if I needed it. I think I will take her up on that offer.
I don’t know your overall circumstances, but in general it’s illegal to rent out space that isn’t habitable. And heat in winter where ti gets cold enough to matter is generally one of those habitability requirements.
You may or may not be in a position to pick a fight with management. But it’s worthwhile to call whatever passes for renter law enforcement in your area to learn what your legal rights are and as well what your practical rights and courses of action are. None of which need involve your management while you’re gathering info.
Good luck. Seriously, not snarkily.
Continuing the discussion of my delayed Amazon delivery – was supposed to be yesterday but was mysteriously rescheduled to December 5 – I’ve been following the tracking information and the details (via “See all updates”, not just the progress bar) were an interesting insight into some of the internal workings of Amazon.
For a while there was nothing at all except “package has left the shipper facility”. But then just before midnight on Saturday, there was “package arrived at an Amazon facility”. I Googled the particular facility, and it turned out to be what Amazon calls a “middle mile sort center”. At which point I was fairly confident that the package would arrive soon, maybe even today. Then in the early hours of the morning, it moved from the sort facility to a carrier facility, the final distribution point. And later this morning, it was “out for delivery” Yay! Arriving this afternoon by 5:45.
Thanks.
I do not think I am in a position to pick a fight with management. Nor, do I think it would help.
When I was moving out of the rodent infested crap hole I lived in before this, my beloved helped me find a new and better place. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize she had done research on the corect building but on another management company that has the same name, until it was too late.
The building is generally great. I have seen a grand total of one roach since I moved in. I have seen no other vermin and no evidence of vermin in my place. The management company is awful. I moved here in two stages, When moving in all the stuff on the first stage we noted some things that needed fixing. I left detailed voice messages with the office. I sent detailed e-mails about what needed to be repaired. I was repeatedly assured that everything would be fixed before I moved in. Nothing was ever fixed.
When we were completing the second stage of moving in, we smelled gas. I immediatekt called the gas company, They quickly sent a team out. They found an internal leak in the oven/range. They cut off the gas to the oven/range. I informed management of the problem- they needed to either repair the oven or install a new one. I also reminded them that out of the list of repairs I had repeatedly sent them, only one repair had ever been done and it had been done by somebody else.
When they repainted the walls between the old tennant leaving and my moving in. they thoroughly clogged the coaxial cable jack on the wall with paint. As I had told them, I work from home. I require an internet connection to do my job. Fortunately, when the Xfinity guy came he just cut off the clogged contact and installed a new one.
Management replied with one of the worst, weakest excuses ever. They said they would replace the oven/range (That was about a month ago. I have heard nothing since), but that they could could not unstick the two windows that will not open, install screens on the windows missing screens, or fix the one window that came off the track and almost fell on the floor when I tried to open it. Why? They said it would be ‘too intrusive’ and that they did not wish to disturb me.
Rather than replying ‘You lying mother fckers! If your concern was disturbing me after I moved in, you could have just done these repairs any of the first five times I asked you too- you know? Before I had all my stuff here and before I started actually living here? And how the fck is un installing my current and broken oven, hauling it down the long and narrow hallway to get it out of my apartment, and then moving a new oven down the hallway and installing it in my kitchen LESS intrusive than fixing the windows?’ Instead I just said in polite Dilbert speak that if they did not want to disturb me in my aparment, could they please fix the lock on my mailbox? I had also been asking for that since before I moved in- and they could quickly and easily install a new lock and give me the key without coming into my apartment at all. Needless to say, they never did that either.
Why am I not in a position to pick a fight? I am a diagnosed hoarder. I have an awful lot of stuff. I have done a lot of work on dealing with my mental disorder and a lot of work getting rid of stuff. The bedroom in my apartment is used for storage. There is a narrow walkway to get to the window and the AC unit. The rest of the room is piles of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid bins higher than my head. Half the width of the entrance hallway is taken up by stacks of boxes running along one wall. The short lease I mentioned earlier does say that a tennant can be evicted for “extreme hoarding”. Pissing off a landlord, even if you are legally in the right, generally means that they find some pretext to terminate your lease and evict you. Since the lease never defines “extreme hoarding”, the instant I become a problem they will just evict me and rent to a tennant who does not complain.
Electric Bill
Years ago, I set my bills to autopay. When I moved, I updated my address with the gas and power companies. I have intentionally never gone paperless. The electric bill came a few days ago. It was very high. I opened it, looked at the details and saw that the power company had updated my address- they were sending mail here, they were charging me for electric use here and not at my last place, but they had stopped auto pay without bothering to tell me. So, last month’s bill never got paid.
I went to their website and set up auto pay again. I hope my credit rating will be okay.
I don’t find that surprising at all. It’s not that they’d cancelled autopay without telling you.
Rather, you had closed an account with them at OldAddress, which of course stopped auto-billing since there was nothing to bill for. Meantime, you had opened a new account at NewAddress. And made no provisions to set up autopay on that account. From their POV, an “account” is not a web login, but rather a service address.
More times than I have wished over the years I’ve been paying electric at multiple addresses simultaneously. From the utility perspective those are each different unrelated accounts and they have no problem with some being autopay or not, some being delinquent or not, etc.
As to credit rating, there ought not be a ding. Further, if you call the utility customer service and talk to them, they can probably put a note in there that minimizes any damage that may occur.
Good luck with everything; it seems you’re one of those unlucky souls with too many rocks in your backpack and not all of them are in any way your fault.
So in the same vein as complaints with landlords - my son’s room has a knob with a lock on it. He’s 3 years old and does not need to lock his door. But he loves locking doors because of course he does. So my medium nightmare happened on Friday and he locked himself in his room. This room is impossible to break into from the outside without doing damage to something. I did try first walking him calmly through the steps to unlock his door but, him being three, it didn’t work.
So I text the landlord. Used the word emergency and everything. And I waited. Nothing. I call the number and it doesn’t work. I start to panic. So I leave my son in his room (where’s he gonna go?) and start knocking on doors. I figure someone must have the landlord’s actual number. After about four doors, someone answers but he doesn’t have the right number either. My panic intensifies. I’m gonna have to call 911. Then, someone comes out into the hallway and does have her number. Success!
I go back to my apartment and call the landlord. She listens and acts like this is a giant inconvenience. Then I tell her “well since people generally frown upon leaving your children locked in rooms, I’ll have to call the fire department. There will probably be some damage.” That makes her do stuff. She calls maintenance.
Maintenance comes out, breaks the doorknob off and frees my son. Total time locked in his room was about an hour.
What a strange design. Every indoor privacy knob set I’ve ever seen has a small hole on the outside knob. Pushing any sort of pin or wire through the hole releases the lock. This didn’t have that?
No! It did not! It had a key. A key no one had.
A previous tenant probably used the bedroom as an office or for some hobby that they really didn’t want their kids getting into.
And installed the appropriate lockset for that mission. Which they left behind when they moved out.
A Therapy Mini Rant
I work in a virtual call center. My workday is supposed to end at 5. Most of the time, I am still helping a caller at 5 and I cannot log off until the call ends. 5:30 is fairly common. I sometimes don’t log off until 6. The latest I have ever logged off was, no exaggeration, 7:30.
So, I need a tele health therapy appointment at 7pm. My therapist has weekday appointments at 7. The rant is about the way they have the website set up to schedule appointments. You navigate through a few steps. Then, you are presented with a calendar showing available appointments. You can only select one open time. You click confirm and it takes you to another page. To schedule another appointment, you have to repeat the process- and the calendar does not show any appointments you have already chosen as unavailable nor does it indicate which appointments you have already chosen. I find this extremely annoying. Tomorrow I am calling the company and attempting to schedule a bunch of appointments over the phone.
Truly a mini rant-
I hadn’t needed to use hot water from the bathroom sink until very recently. Since I get hot water in the shower and turning the cold knob on the bathroom sink produced cold water, that the hot water worked as well. Of course it does not. Turning either knob on the sink gets me very cold water. Between that and my radiator problems, my hands are all dry and cracked. I have lotion. I keep forgetting to use it.
A nice couple has offered to get me if our power goes off but theres a travel advisory. I think they are 1 mile away.
I hate this weather.
I can believe it! The room originally had a deadbolt that by some magic got locked and locked us out of the room a few months ago. So this is the second time this door has gotten locked with no way of getting it open. (The first time, the three year old was NOT in the room).