I dont think Orange Skinner’s house has carpet anywhere in it, except rugs her patents put down.
Once upon a time, Bobo and the Troll and I rented an apartment. It was incredible. A four-bedroom, two-bath place in a college town… for $300 a month! Fantastic!
When we looked at the place, we had second thoughts. For one thing, there was only one window. It was in the master bedroom. The front door was solid steel, and looked like something you’d want if you were building a bank. Half the lighting was fluorescent tubes. One of the bedrooms was eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. That beat the fourth one, though – the fourth one was SIX feet wide and THIRTY feet long…
The apartment building had previously been a warehouse, you see. They’d paneled the sheetmetal walls and put carpeting in over the cement, but hadn’t changed much.
But Jim, the friendly real estate agent and property management man, sold us on it. What a deal! $300 a month… and all that ROOM… (the living room alone was bigger than my last apartment…)
So we signed a six-month lease, enough to get us into the summer… and there, all our tribulations began…
The first thing we noticed was that lightbulbs didn’t seem to last very long in the place. Over the course of the first month, we replaced lightbulbs in lamps like crazy. We eventually mapped the average lifespan of an ordinary lightbulb in The Dangerous Apartment at about two weeks.
At the end of that first month, there was a loud POP from the water heater, and showers became non-possible. It took two days to get friendly ole Jim to send the damn maintenance man out to look at the heater; it had burned out its element. He replaced the element, and hot water flowed once more.
Until the following month… when the POP was heard once again.
A chum with a voltmeter came over and tested our electrical outlets. It seems the place had been wired for industrial machinery, originally – 220 volts, instead of the more user-friendly 110 your house and mine are wired for. They’d replaced some of the light sockets and power outlets, but hadn’t bothered lowering the voltage. Every single outlet in our home had enough juice to power your refrigerator or clothes washer. No wonder we were frying lightbulbs…
And every month, the maintenance man came out to replace the element in the water heater. And each month, he took a little longer between the first call and his arrival.
In the fourth month, he didn’t come at all. Bobo, by then, was living in the dark – his room was lit by eight-foot fluorescent ceiling light tubes, and they’d burned out, and we had no idea where you go to get replacements. There was no hot water. We began calling Maintenance daily.
…and in mid-April, the light switch tried to kill me.
It was two in the morning, and I had to be at work the next morning, and Bobo and the Troll were up watching Highlander for the sixty-third time, and I came out of my bedroom and wandered into the main bath, just off the living room, and flicked on the light–
–and I don’t quite remember what happened after that. I remember my feet hitting the ground, which would seem to imply that they left it at some previous point. I remember a bright flash of light. I remember staggering back into the living room, and seeing Bobo and Troll staring at me, open-mouthed. I had trouble seeing them, since the room seemed to be full of smoke.
Then they laughed while leaping up to see if I was all right. Troll grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me out of the smoke cloud. The room wasn’t full of smoke. My beard was smoking, and I’d been looking at the room through the haze of burnt beard.
The light switch had literally exploded in my hand, and I’d taken a split second’s arc of 220 volts through my body.
I didn’t go to work the next day. Neither did Bobo; he’d gotten up at six to go pee, and had forgotten about the light switch. After that, we taped it over with electrician’s tape, hung a DO NOT TOUCH sign on it, and started calling TWICE a day for friendly ole Jim to send the goddamn maintenance man before the place came crashing down about our ears.
A week went by. Still no repairman. Meanwhile, Bobo and the Troll had managed to shock themselves twice each by accident. The tape didn’t help much, and the little paper sign we’d hung on the switch caught fire once. Finally, we just took the tape off and resigned ourselves to peeing in the dark. We conditioned ourselves against touching the light switch from hell, which was mostly bare wire and metal now – the plastic parts had either shattered or melted due to the current.
In a cold and righteous rage, we realized that the property management agency was ignoring us… and we laid our plans for revenge. We removed all valuables and electronics to the Library (our name for the longest, skinniest bedroom) and threw a party so loud and raucous it was almost apocalyptic. Our friends were over. The neighbors were over. Even some strangers showed up, and we got them drunk, too.
Then we didn’t clean it up.
We started using paper plates and plastic utensils, so we wouldn’t have to wash dishes, and we left the corpse of each meal where it had fallen. Whenever something became especially noisome, we jammed it into a plastic garbage bag… and then left the bag somewhere in the giant living room.
Three bachelors generate a lot of garbage. It began to stack up. Actually, you could tell where the major traffic was in the apartment, because little trails began to appear amidst the crap and clutter…
Then… one day… perfect justice arrived. We’d known it was coming. That’s why we’d saved all our garbage. Friendly Ole Jim showed up to show the apartment to new tenants.
We were ready for him, too. Bobo had sworn he would cease to wear clothes in his own home until the water heater was repaired, but had bowed to pressures from Troll and Troll’s girlfriend Bubbles, and agreed to wear Fruit Of The Looms, but nothing else. (Indoors, that is)
Troll’s daily consumption of two or three Big Gulps from 7-11 had added remarkably to the trash load. At one point, Bobo and I built the Troll a throne entirely from old Big Gulp cups and old album covers. It took up a lot of room. He couldn’t sit on it, of course, so we all began using it for an ashtray.
Me? I quit shaving or trimming my beard. My facial hair grows fairly quickly – it’s one of the reasons I seldom go clean-shaven – and in three weeks, I was doing a pretty good impression of Rasputin, the Mad Monk.
…and so it was on that merry first week of June when Friendly Ole Jim showed up with a nice young couple in tow to show off the apartment.
Bobo was on the couch watching TV in his Fruit Of The Looms. Troll was sitting on the other end of the couch, eating fried chicken out of a bucket. I was at the desk, nearby, writing something or other. Around us, garbage arose in mounds and hills, dark and frightening.
The looks on their faces was great. Jim was doing a fine impression of “enraged”, whereas Ken and Barbie, looking over his shoulders, were more somewhere in the “appalled” range. They immediately began whispering, at which point Jim, ever the salesman, broke in and explained expansively that all this would be gone before the old tenants left… that is, if they expected to get their deposit back…
Without missing a beat, I remarked, “Bobo, that ashtray you’re using is full. Empty it, would you?”
Without missing a beat, Bobo stuck his cigarette in his mouth, picked the ashtray off the end table, dumped it on the floor next to the end table, put it back on the end table, and lightly tapped his ashes in it.
Troll finished his drumstick, pitched it over his shoulder into the darkness, and dug out another one from his bucket.
You have to give Jim credit, though. He tried. Unfortunately, the room closest to the front door was Bobo’s. He ushered Ken and Barbie in and began his spiel about the huge roomy bedrooms in – what’s wrong with this light switch?
“The fluorescent tubes are burnt out,” remarked Bobo. “Been burnt out since late May. We keep callin’ Maintenance, and they keep ignoring us. Water heater’s burnt out, too. Can’t wash no dishes.” To punctuate his remark, he gestured around him.
Troll choffed another chicken fragment, leaned in such a way as to get a clear shot at the front door, and pitched the bone out, just past the shocked trio.
The looks on Ken and Barbie’s faces were shifting wonderfully… they’d started at “appalled”, and faded gradually to “fearful”, and now were moving into “horrified” territory. Makes me wish we’d had a camcorder at the time, really.
“Well, with these kind of tenants, you can expect this sort of thing,” growled Jim. His eyes were violently angry by this point, which amused us all terribly – after all, HE hadn’t been taking cold showers for three weeks now, had he? "Over here, we have the master bathroom, right off the living room. In here–
FzzZZAaaaKKK!
He’d got a good grip on the light switch before it bit him, too. All of a sudden, I could see why Troll and Bobo had laughed when they saw me do it, even though they were worried for my safety. Friendly Ole Jim jumped a good three feet in the air, and I saw sparks dance in his hair, which had stood on end, spiky, from the current.
Ken and Barbie had seen enough. They RAN from the apartment, not bothering to close the door, leaped in their car and peeled out of the parking lot like they were afraid we were going to chase them down and FORCE them to live with us…
Jim staggered out of the bathroom, stunned and wobbly. There were wisps of smoke in his hair.
“You want to watch that light switch,” said Troll amiably. “Som’pin wrong with it. Shock your ass off if you touch it.”
Friendly Ole Jim shook his head to clear it… and looked at us with murder in his eyes. “What the fuck IS this?”
I stood up and fixed him with my best Mad Monk glare. Troll stood up too. Troll is named for his size, among other things, so when Troll stands up, he keeps standing up for quite some time.
“Been calling you for almost a month now,” I snarled. “Lights don’t work. Water heater doesn’t work. We’ve all shocked ourselves silly on that goddamn light switch. You kept telling us we’d get maintenance as soon as it was available.”
“Is it available yet?” remarked Bobo sweetly.
Friendly Ole Jim opened his mouth to say something… and about then, the Troll finished standing up. Friendly Ole Jim realized he was alone in a house with three guys who had every right to be royally pissed at him… and decided not to push it. Instead, he stormed out and slammed the door.
We waited.
Forty-five minutes later, an entire maintenance CREW showed up, along with a note from Jim about how we were in violation of our lease due to filth, and if we didn’t get the place cleaned up pronto, he was going to sic the Department Of Health on us as an excuse to evict us.
We smiled and congratulated ourselves and patted each others’ backs. We knew no sane landlord would take the trouble and legal expense to evict tenants who were gonna be gone in three weeks anyway. We did clean the house up, though, which pleased our friends and girlfriends immensely…
…and to this day, I savor that afternoon. You don’t get perfect justice very often, and in this vale of tears, one should hold memories like this close to one’s heart…
The previous owners of my house left several “Stick-Ups” air fresheners in each closet. When we first moved in we got a kick out of it; “Eeewwww weee! They must’ve had some stinky shoes in there, hehehe”.
Did you know that “Stick-Ups” can NOT be removed without also removing paint and drywall?
So now we have a collection of 1980’s era air fresheners on display in each closet. :rolleyes:
My family moved a lot when I was a child (military brat) and we always had fun leaving things behind in our old houses. Usually it was fairly benign, mostly pennies over the doorframes and such.
When my hubby and I moved into our first apartment (cinderblock walls, shag carpeting, bathroom the size of a closet, but only $250 a month!) we found such oddities as a christmas ornament hung over the bathroom mirror and a spatula buried underneath a corner of the rug. We left a strange abstract oil painting that hubby did in a niche formed by the kitchen cabinets and the stove, and I left glow in the dark stars in a spiral pattern on the ceiling fan.
You could always fashion tiny people out of twigs and thread, and arrange them in the medicine cabinet in such a way as to form a little city. Or tie all the cabinets, doors, and toilet seats down with fishing wire. Another idea would be to create a map of the apartment and label certain areas with cryptic notations. Then take the map and age it with tea, burn the edges, and hide it behind a baseboard or tape it to the underside of a cabinet. To add to the effect, use symbols from the map and draw them lightly with pencil over the areas marked. Leave something interesting, such as a blank floppy disk in one of the locations. Might make for an interesting scavenger hunt.
Wang-Ka, that post was a thing of beauty. Transported, I was. You have a new fan.
I once went back to a place I had rented to check if any of my mail had been sent there. The place was not occupied so I went to the agent I had previously rented through and he gave me the keys.
Well this place had a bedroom, which now had a bolt on the outside of the door with the added benefit of a one way mirror in the wall. Since it was a very secluded property that struck me as spooky.
Damn, I wish I’d heard of these when I had to move out of my dorm room. Maybe I’ll tell the friends I have left there some of these tricks.
Leave porn on top of the cabinets, if there’s a space.
In the same vein as writing in glow-in-the-dark paint, try writing using some sort of matte finish paint (you can get it at hobby stores). I’m not sure if this would work, but the next time they paint, it might leave unpainted writing behind because the paint wouldn’t stick to it.
You could also take a Barbie doll, dress it up in little teeny bondage gear, and hang it from a closet rod with a little tiny noose.
Pull up the carpets and layer the floor under it with purple mylar, then put the carpet back.
Or put potato chips under the carpet.
Put something on all the hinges (salt water?) so that a few months from now, they all start to squeak.
Place a couple subscriptions to some really off-the-wall erotic magazines, and ask them to start delivery in two months.
Rather than seeding the carpet, seed the lawn with a faster-growing, different-colored variety, and make some designs–big happy face, chaos symbol, or, everybody’s favorite, a pentacle! Ooh! You could paint one on the floor under the carpet, with bloodstains!
Subscribe to kinky porno mags, using the apartment’s address, but the landlord’s name.
Nothing to add to the brilliance already displayed here, except that once my friend moved into a new place with a teeny closet off the kitchen, that had a leather harnass still suspended in it. Her old and conservative father wondered what it was for (’ … it’s for sex, daddy’), and they discreetly put it in a box and returned it to the original tenant.
Never got the hook out of the ceiling, though.
Tightly wrap some small random object (e.g. a plastic McToy) in bubble wrap. Tape the package to an inside surface of the toilet cistern.
I like the aforementioned idea of leaving a floppy disk somewhere weird.
Our local bookstore in order to make things spooky, drew body outlines & some animal outlines on their carpet.
What does purple mylar under carpet do?
If there is carpet that is located over some type of hardwood flooring, lift up the carpet, and either live a thin item like an envelope with disturbing passges written inside.
If kitchen cabinets have a few feet of space between them and the cailing, write messages on the top. Things like “Kitten brains go here” or “Behold the holy rising of the mysterious sunflower god, Rezla!”
Ceiling fans? Invariably at some point someone will be up there either cleaning or fixing something. Leave lovely messages written on the top of the blades.
Same thing as a tin foil hat, except it protects you from transmissions coming into your house through the water pipes.
Wang-Ka, I haven’t laughed so hard in a while. My boss walked in as I was wiping tears off my face and he asked “What’s wrong?”…
Get lots of pictures of President Bush and lots of porn pictures. Cut out Bush’s head from all of his pictures and paste them over the heads of the porn models.
President Bush fetish…no, that’s just too freaky.
Something sort of like this happened to me, and it did freak me out a little.
I rented an apartment with a shed in the backyard with a clothes dryer hook up in it. After several months, I noticed that the thing that was constantly catching my shirt as I went in and out was a slide lock.
Weird thing was, it was on the inside. Never did figure out why someone would want to lock themselves inside a shed.
… and then email me the address and what time you’ll be leaving so I can come in and find it before the new renters …