Sunday, November 9, 2008

Garbage In, Garbage Out

In an attempt to move out of a (slightly) less than happy living experience, my roommate and I need to take matters into our own hands. In order to get out of our apartment lease, we must find new tenants.

However, our landlord is being quite difficult.

Not in the sense of "you can't! you must stay, I OWN YOU!"
No, just being as unhelpful as is humanly possible.

For starters, I have taken control of the situation. My roommate happens to be a hippie, and not the Abbie Hoffman type. The Cheech-and-Chong, fall-asleep-in-the-bathtub type.
So basically, I'm doing it all on my own.

Great.

Let's make some fliers. Let's post them. Let's receive a phone call from landlord->hippie a week later, informing us that the new tenants will pay $50 more in rent. So all those fliers? Waste. Oh, and the landlord knew I was making them. It was actually the landlords idea.

Ok, ok. No biggie.
My other ads are digital, and easily changed. Craigslist had been receiving some good hits, including one woman who is very inquisitive about the full price of moving in. I shall email the landlord, requesting her to email this woman, informing her of the costs, and taking an active landlord roll.

This morning, two days after I had sent the email, I receive this:

There is a first last payment due before move in plus a refebishing fee of $150


There's a what? And where do you keep your punctuation?
Well, ok, I can just mail this to that.... but wait, I cannot understand this sentence.

How can this person be in a place of power over me? This isn't just an off-day for landlord, nor is it a rushed answer. All things written by this person are like this. I'm actually surprised there aren't more unnecessarily cap letters.

On a side note, this person also made a typo in our lease agreement. Not just a "typeo" typo, more like confusing the word "responsible" with "reasonable."


And that counts as a legal document.