We had done our research online to the best extent we could. We emailed and called a lot of potentials. We narrowed it down to a stripe of Maryland just north of the District. We confirmed appointments. When we got here, we instantly discovered the market was different. We're in the South now. People, real estate agents even, don't feel particularly pressured to show up on time. One guy didn't even know who to call to get keys. The other ones, well, when we did see them it looked like they didn't really work much. It was a little odd, and our two-day rush to find a place to live was less than satisfying. But we found our current apartment, and everything seemed fine.
The staff was friendly, the online reviews weren't terrible (despite the stabbing that happened some months prior). We couldn't see the specific apartment we wanted to rent, but we saw a similar one and it was good enough. We signed a lease. No security deposit needed and they waived the amenities and pet fees. We were given a move-in date that worked out well for everyone. When we signed the lease, the building was owned and managed by Archstone.
We moved in in early October. Some of those exploits are catalogued elsewhere. A few weeks later, we were notified that the building would soon be sold to Avalon and new management would be coming in. Great, we thought. Avalon's a pretty good company, they'll probably clean up some of the edges around here. We never met the new management.
The building was flipped to Borger, another massive real estate management company, within a month. I don't think we ever made a rent payment to Avalon. Borger was it's own kind of fun. The staff seemed like they were third-stringers. There was one exuberant manager lady, the rest were the late shift at Burger King on a turnpike travel plaza: they just didn't give a fuck. One girl wouldn't even smile at you when she looked at you and didn't bother to register anything you said about the locks on the doors not working, or that you got a notification there was a package for you at the front desk. She barely even apologized when I found her sleeping in the lobby when she was supposed to be answering phones.
But it was looking up. They slowly got their shit together. They got this cool electronic tracking system for packages and so on, and they were starting to paint lines in the parking deck and get parking spaces organized and had a few community events so you could get to know your neighbors. And riiiiight about then, the building was sold to Gables. That lazy girl found out that she was losing her job from me--she didn't even bother to read her email. I found out from a flyer stuck in my door. She probably put it there.
It was only a stutter-stop it seemed. The new management took a month or so to get everything sorted out, and then it was just about as good as Borger was when they left. They scrapped the assigned parking space thing in favor of people just paying more for the spots they wanted and the rest of us had free-for all. Then it got really. Fucking. Cold.
The way our building is designed, the hallways and most of the stairwells are open to the air. It's somewhere between an apartment building and an outdoor outlet mall. It seemed a bit odd when we moved in, but the occasional breeze down the hallway felt good. You could turn the corner and see if it was raining or whatever and go back and get your umbrella. People would smoke on the balconies and chat. It's kind of homey. It's like a little neighborhood.
But that also means that all the main water pipes for water supply and drains and whatnot are not really insulated from the world. In fact, they're basically exposed. And that means they freeze easier. Oh, and the hot water heaters and so on? Those are in little utility rooms on the external walls of the building. So yeah, they freeze too.
The funny thing about hot water heaters is that they're insulated in such a fashion as to keep the heat in, and the outside parts stay relatively cool. In fact, they react to cold just like anything else. Worse, maybe, if the fittings are the wrong kind of metal, or if they're on a long, flat wall with a lot of wind along that corridor, then they will lose heat in a magnificent fashion. If you run your hot water regularly, like take a shower and do the dishes every day, there's a kind of equilibrium that keeps this from happening except in extreme cases. Well, we had some extreme cases. In three days this winter, the two hot water heaters in the two apartments above us failed and gushed water down our bedroom wall and into the rental offices, below.
The call with the emergency maintenance line was comical. It was like I was talking to a robot. I might have been, but I think it was a human reading a script because there were some "ums" and specific rephrasing of things I had said that were not in line with a computer. In any case, when I said, "Call everybody, there's water gushing down the side of my apartment," they didn't get it and I was just about to call the fire department when the alarms started going off anyway.
Fire alarms were a common thing for us until sometime late this spring. When water pressure drops in a system, the system thinks the sprinklers are on, and that means FIRE so the computer calls the fire department. Our fire alarms are deafening. Which is good, I guess, if you want to avoid fire. But if it's a false alarm because the system is shit, or if someone burned their dinner, or a water line exploded... well, that's just annoying. It would happen all hours of the day, any day, for any reason. Sometimes you'd see the exploded water lines blasting rooster tails into the street. Other times, it was a lot of tired, pissed-off looking firemen asking, "where the hell is the super?" We never knew. The management company changed too often. The contact number in the little book the fireman had was two companies ago. When it warmed up, they mostly stopped. I think someone compartmentalized the system so that the whole building wouldn't shriek. I know that alarms have gone off in the building because the magnets on the fire doors let go and I have to push through them to get to my apartment.
Strangely, the Wolf would just sleep through all of this. While Carly and the dogs and I would suffer through the sound that makes your skull vibrate, rattling you down to your gonads, frantically putting on shoes and leashes and grabbing umbrellas to go stand out in the parking lot, the Wolf just yawned.
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