Fifth Avenue Court in Portland, OR sucks.

Been a while since I updated. Seems an appropriate time.

Had a pretty shitty week. Trying to negotiate for a pay increase at work and it’s been like pulling teeth. Apparently the three promotions I’ve received aren’t really promotions, because I was “on loan” to the sales and marketing team, and that I’m actually still an artist at the company… which was certainly news to me as I’ve only done two or three models since March. Seems that it’s a communication error, one that will hopefully be resolved quickly.

The other stressful bit was with my apartment manager. When I moved in eight months ago, she said there was no pet deposit on caged animals and let me move in with my parakeet without paying anything. Last Tuesday, she did an inspection of all the apartments in the building and saw our nine pet rats, and said “Uh oh! You may have to pay a $300 pet deposit, even though I told you there was no deposit for caged animals.” This sucks, but I suppose I can understand since there are nine, after all.

On Thursday, she approached me on my way home from work and said “Sorry, you’re going to have to pay $300 for every two pets you have. You owe me $1500, OR you can give all your pets away.” After heroically restraining myself from stomping all the blood out of her body, I growled “I’ll get back to you later” and stomped home.

I feel I should interject with a back-story here by detailing precisely why I hate this woman so much, and how much she hates me.

When I first moved in here she seemed nice but extremely incompetent. When I was filling out my apartment rental history, she asked me if I was the one that was paying for the apartment I lived in when I was nine years old. She also believed me when I said I was in Vietnam, despite the fact that I wasn’t even born that decade and my birthdate was right in front of her.

After that, it went downhill. Every time my next-door neighbors would initiate a rousing game of “Pick up all the house furniture and hurl it into the wall” I would complain to my manager, she’d get irritated at me for distracting her from her important EBay buying and then do nothing.

On one occasion, our other next door neighbor actually went INSANE at 6am one morning and started attacking his walls with a sledgehammer, screaming “THIS FUCKING SUCKS!” at the top of his lungs and flinging everything he could get his hands on out of the window and into the crowded city street six floors down. We also heard him in his bathroom smashing the full-length mirror and kicking the cabinets in.

Dea and I were terrified because we could FEEL enormous chunks of drywall falling off the adjoining wall between our apartments and crumbling on the floor. We called the police and quickly left the apartment for fear of being hurt.

Two days later, I go to our apartment manager and ask her what happened, and she looked annoyed at me and said “I don’t know” and wouldn’t elaborate further. A few days later, after the psycho next door had already fled the building, we found her as she was going upstairs to inspect the damage to the apartment. She wouldn’t let us in, but she later said that NOTHING was damaged, and looked at us accusingly like we were insane.

The next week, there was a constant stream of builders and drywall specialists coming in and out of the apartment. They spent two weeks on it noisily repairing all the “non-existent” damage.

As time passed she became more and more hostile toward me. She started by ignoring us outright, then yelling at us, demanding we wear different clothes (we wore jeans and t-shirts), and one time she even slammed her office door in my face when I was trying to get her to inspect a noxious chemical burning smell in my apartment that had made me vomit all morning.

Finally she actually started HIDING MY MAIL. We live in a closed-access building and all packages received go into her office in the lobby, which is always locked. When people get packages, she writes their apartment number on a sheet of paper and pastes it on her office door. For the last four months or so, she’s deliberately never written down our apartment number while she still rapidly updates other peoples’ package notices.

One time she actually SIGNED for two packages of ours, kept them for a week without giving us any notice, and finally I had to go to her and find out if I had anything, and she had the nerve to pretend that she didn’t know the ONLY two GIGANTIC packages in her office that she’d signed for the week before were mine.

Over Christmas, she left for Christmas vacation for two weeks without any advance notice and without leaving an emergency phone number. We had a package full of Christmas cookies and bread and pie locked in her office for two weeks that was all ruined by the time we were able to retrieve the package.

This is all in addition to the fact that even though her actual work hours are 9 to 6, she shows up at 10:30, takes a two-hour lunch at 12, then leaves at 4:30. Some days she doesn’t show up at all. In fact, on two separate occasions she’s been absent for an entire week for no reason. When she isn’t at work, we can’t have packages delivered, and we’ve had our packages turned back dozens of times because of her absences.

These are all things she does on a regular basis. In fact, Liquid Development is in the same building as her office. There are two bathrooms in the center of the building, and she used to only have them cleaned once a month. Anytime the bathrooms would get dirty (after a month of constant usage) she would barge into our office and blame us for deliberately trashing the bathrooms and demand that we all go clean it up. She’s also accused all the employees of doing drugs in the restrooms.

So do you have an idea of why I hate this woman? I’d hope so.

Now, back to the original story. She’d arbitrarily changed the rules for pet deposits without any prior notice and she’s trying to bilk me out of nearly three months’ worth of rent for nine rats. There are six girls and three boys. The six girls are the size of gerbils and the three boys are 1/3 the size of a Guinea pig. The amount of money my apartment manager was demanding of me would be the same amount of money I would have to pay for ten full-grown Great Danes running around my 650 sq ft apartment.

To put it in terms of weight, I could have 1,300 pounds of free-roaming canine (well over HALF A TON) for the same price that she is demanding of me for approximately five pounds of caged domestic rats.

To put it in terms of money, I hired movers to transport a ton and a half of my personal belongings more than two thousand miles through seven states (half the width of the United States) for one hundred dollars LESS than she’s demanding me for anticipated damage of a caged animal the size of a roll of quarters.

I’ve illustrated my point now. :)

To resolve this, I called the management company that employs her, got in touch with her supervisor, explained to him the situation and he said “$1500? That’s ridiculous. I’ll admit that that is a lot of rats, but I couldn’t make you pay that much. I think we can both agree that a single $300 pet deposit for all of your animals would be reasonable. I’ll call her right now and tell her to set this straight.” I wholeheartedly agreed, thanked him and the issue was resolved in a single phone call in less than a minute. :D

I’d loved to have seen the look on her face when he told her. I actually don’t mind the fact that she’s going to be even more of a bitch to me now for having gone over her head, because I fucking WON.

My next step is to write a letter of complaint of her inexcusable behavior to her management company and try to get her either severely reprimanded or fired outright. I’d love to see her forced to whore herself out to the homeless to make ends meet.

That’s about all I have to say today. Writing has always been wonderfully therapeutic for me. I feel much better now.