There are slum lords... and then there are Slum Lords

I used to think the place we live in was pretty badly kept up. Holes in the edges of the carpet, a shower door that does little to keep water in the shower, a sink with the plug broken so I have to reach underneath to make it plug, a silverwear drawer that falls off its track every single time I open it, and to top it off coin op washers and driers that are often out of service awaiting someone to take out all the quarters.

But this doesn't give the proper idea of the horrible things we've seen the past week. Think for just a moment of Darth Vader entering your living room, pointing the finger of doom, and proclaiming "Your repairs shall never be complete. It is their destiny!"

Something like that must have happened for the apartments with half the interior doornobs missing even after having been up on the market for a month and when you complain about it all they'll say is we'll put in a work order. No guarantees of fixing anything before moving in. Or the apartment that was advertized as ready to rent but when you walked inside it felt like they were trying to renovate but after taking apart all the parts they wanted to fix they decided to leave them lying in little piles all over the floor, with graffiti spray painted over the door, maybe a quarter of the sign out front advertising it for rent broken out, and screens from windows ripped loose and hanging from the outside walls. And the person showing us around didn't even apologize for the mess or explain how soon they intended to fix any of it, as if they expected us to move in without any expectation that the hanger rail in the closets would be hung or that the shower heads would be reattatched or that the shelves in the linen closet would ever become anything other than a pile of wood on the floor.

Bonnie and I have finally settled on a place from the same old company that provides the rest of the apartments in town known for washers that are broken because nobody has taken the money out of them yet. But, the only obvious things wrong with it at the moment are we haven't found what happened to the second oven rack, they haven't quite installed the replacement part for the toilet, and the bathtub hasn't been cleaned. Everything else looks great.

There have been a few gems where great upkeep combined with great price for a perfect apartment, but they were so far out by the time we convinced ourselves it was worth living so far from work and the store someone else (probably car enabled and unfearful of distance) already took it.