Ladies and gentlemen, it is the weekend. And not just any weekend, but a HOLIDAY weekend! We’ve come through this long and arduous week, probably not completely unscathed, and perhaps a little worse for the wear, but certainly alive enough to enjoy 3 whole days off.

After the week I’ve had a little attitude adjustment is a good thing, though I completely deny being the one in need of the adjustment. It was a week rife with fuckery and promises of bodily injury (I don’t make threats.). On top of my usual dick-brained chode fluffers, I had 3 separate people tell me this week what my job is, and not one of those people signs my paycheck or works in my office.

A certain firm owns a house with two units that still aren’t rented, and very slim chance left to do so. It took them to match the market price, and the current tenants haven’t cleaned the place in like, two years. The place is a semi-occupied cave redolent of cheap beer, stale cigarettes, and swamp ass and no one wants to live in it. Yet, according to this firm, I need to do a better job of marketing. I should be updating Craigslist ads every day (violation of the ToS), changing the ad copy on website “x” every weekend (we don’t have access to their account), and actively engaging in daily social media networking and taking out Facebook ads. (Waste of time, waste of money, and fuck you.) 

He “expects better results from the company we pay to manage the properties. It’s part of your job as management to stay on top of these things.”
“Uhm, no, it’s not. We’re not your management company. We do leasing and maintenance only. My ‘job’ in that respect includes the same level of marketing that I do for all my other properties, and if there were any special requirements that you had, it was your responsibility to bring them up well before now when you’re freaking out and looking for someone to blame. The apartment looks terrible, it was overpriced for 4 months, and you refused to grant us the authority to set or revise pricing. I’ve worked overtime to show show and market these properties, with you disregarding my advice at every turn. If these don’t rent, the blame falls squarely in your zip code, not mine.”

He got pissed off and hung up on me to go consult our contract. I never heard from him again, but I did get a call requesting that I coordinate and supervise cleaning and maintenance, followed by an hour of moving furniture and staging the units. Did I mention that I don’t make a penny above my regular wage if I get these rented for them?

Meanwhile, at a property a few miles away, I have an apartment scheduled for new carpet installation because the tenant is moving in this weekend. Only we’re running on a very tight schedule now, because my (not-so) favorite property owner, and the subject of a past WTF Friday kicked them off the premises on the basis that he “never authorized the work.”  Are you fucking kidding me? I actually left the office to call him so that my coworkers have plausible deniability when it comes time for the official homicide investigation.

“I have half a mind to blow off my next appointment, drive over there and murder you RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that I crush your windpipe and you cease to live immediately afterward. What the fuck did you think I meant? And where the hell do you get off kicking out my carpet crew for work that I scheduled, with your permission, three fucking weeks ago?!”
“I authorized that?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I would rather that we wait so that I can use the extra money toward construction at the other building. That carpet will last another year.”
“That carpet is threadbare and it is being replaced whether you like it or not. You will stay out of that building, away from the carpet crew and you will stop interfering in my management duties, or you will rent your own properties next year. I have had enough of this shit. Do you understand me?!?”
“Yes, ma’am.”

A tenant scheduled for June 1st move-in wants to pick up her keys today to move in over the weekend. Unfortunately, the current tenants didn’t finish moving out until today and they lived there for 9 years, meaning that I have to clean, and paint, and replace carpet. The holiday weekend means that it won’t be ready until the afternoon of the 30th. When I explained this to the tenant, she threw a temper tantrum that a toddler would have slapped her for.
“This is ridiculous! I should be able to move in this weekend! I work during the week and can’t take time off work to move in the middle of the week!”
“You insisted that you wouldn’t sign a lease unless we replaced everything and that cannot be done in a day. You’ve had two months to make arrangements for moving and now you’ll just have to make do with getting your keys two days early instead of a week early.”
“I demand compensation! You order a new washer and dryer!”
“Not a chance. The washer and dryer that’s in the unit works perfectly fine. You just don’t like the color. Your keys will be ready on the 30th at 4:00. Remember to bring the remaining $200 for your security deposit.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You won’t be moving in.” *click*

Fuck.Me.Running. I consider the fact that I didn’t kick, punch, choke, stab, or run over somebody to be at least five miracles and I will be home all weekend waiting for the letter announcing my sainthood. Bring on the booze and have a drink people. We’ve earned it.

I don’t know why I even try to go to the grocery store between 4:00 and 6:00 pm. It’s like every space cadet in the city is working the check out lines and 150 human puddles of duh are trying to do a month’s worth of grocery shopping at the same time. Of course, I’ll go in knowing exactly which 3 things I want and where to find them, but not one store has all three of them in stock at the same motherfucking time. And then there are those apotheoses of inhumane fuckery that I think some people still refer to as “people.”

I stopped first to pick up some apples that weren’t made of mushy suck, and grab a few other things. The first of the human island twatbadgers that I ran into, I almost quite literally ran into, because she came to a short and sudden stop just inside the door and checked her purse for her cell phone. Someone else that was walking in with me asked “Don’t you wish you could shove those people?”
“Yeah, but it’s generally frowned upon to push, shove, trip, or yell ‘Step aside, Fatty!’ without being asked to leave or speak to a police officer.”

And fuck shopping carts! Shopping carts should be illegal! Or require some sort of licensing/etiquette test.

Actually, some of you really should consider trying it the other way.

At one point, some old lady lacking any situational awareness whatsoever stopped dead in the middle of the aisle leading to all the checkout lines and turned around to talk to someone about her grandchild. After about 5 seconds of waiting for her to turn around and move her cart, I got fed up and moved it to the side for her. And by to the side, I mean I walked away with it and left it on the other side of the store.

I stopped at Target next and managed to get through throngs of screaming toddlers in race carts in record time. I got in line, dropped my crap on the conveyor belt, and tossed my little divider up behind my pile. Not ten seconds later, some short, fat bitch, whom I shall hereafter refer to as Hobbitwat, rammed her shopping cart into my ass and started throwing a cart full of lean cuisines and cat food on there. I stepped as far forward as I could without sitting in the lap of the lady in front of me, but Hobbitwat kept pushing her cart right up to my heels and getting audibly huffy that I wouldn’t move forward. Finally, I used my generously sized ass to bump her cart back into her and said, “Look, lady. I don’t know what you’re into, but I’m not a fan of pegging. Keep your cart out of my ass and your impatience to yourself!”  She glared at me for a few seconds before literally throwing everything back in her cart and storming away to another checkout line.

Maybe you should put a few of the lean cuisines back and get yourself some wax for your upper lip, you hideous troll beast.

I played frogger with a dozen shopping carts in the produce department and a dozen more sugar addled crotch droppings in the snack food aisle before emerging victorious with my pre-made tray of frozen Stouffer’s enchiladas. And then some 30-something lardass skidmark of humanity threw a bag of pizza rolls at his roommate, missed, and bounced it off my head instead.

“Ow! Goddammit, Asshole!” *rounding the corner, still pissed off* “God DAMN, I hate people!” Twenty pairs of eyes all fixed on me and my expression of pissed off indignation, not that it mattered to me… “Yeah, I was probably talking about every single one of you too!”

And then I went and stood in line behind those motherfuckers. Where one flappy lipped cock cozy decided to comment on my purchase.
*Gesturing at my enchiladas* “Those aren’t exactly good for you.”
*Me, fighting the urge to bludgeon her with my frozen goodness* “Huh. Well isn’t this interesting?”
“What?”
“I thought my face made perfectly clear the number of fucks I give right now.”
“Hmph. You’ve got quite an attitude. You must be a joy at parties.”
“Oh, honey. If I gave two shits about what some frumpy, judgmental, Midwestern hell harpy of a housewife thought about me, I’d probably be every inch as miserable as anyone who finds themselves in your presence.”

Ask Mr. Rex about the number of fucks he gives. Then divide by zero to get my number.

And this is why I shouldn’t be allowed to interface with the public at large.

We’re doing it again at the end of June.

So then I got to the office this morning feeling moderately rested and found 29 messages in the voicemail and another 27 in my inbox. I finally cleared the weekend backlog at around 12:30 and my weekend calm reserves were on the low side. Then I got these phone calls. But rather than letting it shatter my calm entirely, I tried a new approach to dealing with irrational cuntmuppets- I just refused to engage the crazy today. At all.

“I’m not in the country. How am I supposed to pay rent?”
“If you still have access to your online bill pay through your bank account, you can have them mail me a check.”
“But how do I pay with a credit card?”
“You can’t. We don’t have a way to take credit cards.”
“So the only way that I can pay my rent is to write a check and mail it? Maybe next year you’ll join the 21st century.”
“Don’t count on it.”*click*

“I just got a parking ticket at *address* and you need to call the city and tell them to reverse it. I was moving my daughter out of her apartment and I was only there for an hour.”
“We don’t own that parking lot, so we can’t ask the city to reverse the ticket. You’d have to call the person who gave you permission to park there.”
“I wasn’t in a lot. I was on the street in front of your building. Those are your parking spaces.”
“Haha, no. Those belong to the city and if you weren’t feeding the meter, they are going to expect you to pay that ticket.”
“This is BULLSHIT! You’re a liar! Get your manager on the phone NOW!”
“Yeah, no.” *click*

A tenant graduated this weekend and is driving to join her boyfriend out of state. She dropped off her keys in a huff because she left us a voicemail yesterday, Sunday, about paint and we didn’t call her back because no one was in the office. The conversation started with attitude and was all downhill from there.
“We didn’t do the touchup paint because we didn’t have time because YOU don’t return phonecalls. I’d better not be charged for that.”
“I don’t think it will be an issue. We’ll see what everything looks like when I go do the check out. I may be able to just touch it up myself when I’m there.”
“I’d better not get charged for any cleaning either. We were up until midnight cleaning, which is time I could have been spending with my friends.”
“Like I said, we’ll see what everything looks like when I go do the inspection.”

I did the checkout, and everything looked pretty good except that they obviously missed the bathtub, the stove/oven, and the kitchen sink was smeared with some kind of greasy mess. There were also dust bunnies flying off the ceiling fan when I turned it on, but overall, it wasn’t terrible. Still, I have to call the cleaning company for those things. The tenant called me 5 minutes after I got back from the apartment.

*In a snide, sarcastic tone* “Did everything meet with your rigid expectations?”
“Overall, it was pretty good. There were a few things that got missed, but it shouldn’t take the cleaning crew more than an hour. You’ll be looking at a $40 deduction from security, tops.”
“No, there will be no deduction at all. The things I ‘missed’ were intentional because that’s how they were when I moved in.”
“That’s not how that works. You signed after you moved in that the premises were in acceptable condition. If that wasn’t the case you should have notified us and we’d send the cleaners back to fix it.”
“I didn’t like the job that they did to begin with. I certainly wasn’t letting them back in the house to fix something that should have been right to begin with.”
“That was your choice. You’ll have to accept the cleaning charges now.”
“Well I don’t accept, and I refuse to hang up until you agree to waive that.”
“Oh, I have a really simple fix for that.” *click*

Oddly enough, none of these people bothered to call back and scream some more.

Final score-

Mandi: Winning.
Humanity: Finally learning.

If my brother and I were twins, this is how we'd start our birthday house fire.

But I just barely broke into my 30s! That’s not old, right? Despite my abject hatred of most people under 25 I’d like to think that I’m still young enough to be relevant, but when it comes to the kids’ musical interests, or movies, or hobbies, I find myself increasingly NOT GIVING A SHIT.

The TV Show Glee was probably my first rude awakening. I actually heard one of my tenants talking to her roommate about a song on the show and she *actually said* “I think it’s great that they make these songs more popular with everyone and they can even make up new songs too!” The song she though they were making up? Fat Bottomed Girls. Freddie Mercury is a unicorn, and the beautiful, mythical creature is spinning in his grave right now.

Freddie Mercury owes you a cunt punch, whore.

People in their 20s don’t even realize it when songs they listen to are actually covers of songs that were done before they were born. Newsflash, asshats – Fred Durst was not the master poet behind the song Faith. Alien Antfarm did not spawn Smooth Criminal. The Brittney Spears atrocity that you know as “I Love Rock & Roll” was not her creation and she is a butcher. Don’t even get me started on all the Bob Dylan covers that no one knows are covers, or the whole David Bowie/Nirvana “The Man Who Sold the World” thing.

Speaking of Nirvana - I was growing up in the greater Seattle area at the time Nirvana was popular and judge all you want, but I was a child of the Grunge era. I skipped school to go to the guy’s memorial service in Pioneer Square* in April of 1994. Wait, 18 years ago? No fucking way…

*Mom- This is probably the first you’re hearing of this, but that’s cool because I’m a grownup and the statute of limitations is UP. 

The Grunge Era: That transitional phase where not only was it easier for bands to ditch the hairspray, it was just easier to quit washing your hair entirely.

Other generational disparities that make me want to swan kick anyone born after 1985:

• “I wanna be like Mike” An independent survey of every tenant who came into my office since Wednesday revealed that NOT A SINGLE ONE of the people surveyed who were born after 1988 know who the fuck this statement is about. And that’s sad.
• I find nothing in this world more stabby-making than the sound of 20 something girls getting bent the fuck out of shape about trivial drama. Except the sound of 13 year old girls of similar disposition.
• I hate these little twats whose biggest worry in life right now is that they exceeded their clothing budget for the month that their parents set for them. Bitch, please. I’ve been paying for my own clothes since I was 14 and working a summer job to afford that day-long shopping trip with mom.
  

  I hope you kick yourself in the face with that stiletto.

My Uncle Todd mentioned on Facebook that he realized only recently that is one of those cranky old men who yells at the kids to get off his lawn. Now, the guy has just slightly more than a decade of years on me, but he’s been that cranky old man as long as I’ve had memories of him, and I have always thought that was awesome. I recommended that he embrace that fact and use it for his financial gain. Then I recommended that he invest in low voltage taser mines for his front lawn.

I finally realized after a conversation thread in a blog regarding pedestrians that I have turned into the exact same “get off my lawn” person that good ol’ Uncle Todd was alluding to earlier. Working in the middle of campus, it’s a daily near-miss with the throngs of undergrads wearing headphones like social interaction causes cancer; who barrel through crosswalks and the campus mall like Ray fucking Lewis with a lock on a quarterback. They have absolutely no regard for the oncoming traffic they’re frogger-ing through and I wouldn’t be able to summon enough fucks to give if one of them did step in front of me one day. The only thing worse than those little assbags are the effervescent shit stains zipping through traffic on the two-stroke dildos they like to call “mopeds,” but we’ve all revisited that little diatribe enough this academic year.

Suffice to say, I demand that you little fuckers get off my lawn, my sidewalk, and my general zip code.

 
The little sociopaths that constitute my tenant base are wrapping up finals and leaving town finally, but not before they stop in to be assholes, mostly just for the sake of being assholes. Seriously, some little dipshit stopped in to drop off his keys, looked in my candy dish and said,

“Man, why don’t you ever have anything good like M&Ms or Skittles?”

“Because they’re not individually wrapped, and children are filthy creatures.”

“We’re not children! I also happen to think I’m pretty clean compared to most people.”

“For starters, I’m old enough to have birthed you, kid. Granted, it would have been into a toilet bowl at prom, but I’m still old enough. And you forget that I’ve seen your apartment. A prom toilet full of afterbirth is still cleaner than anything in your place.”

I wish I could say the reference to birth at prom was the first one this week. Ken and I went to the last symphony performance of the season this past Saturday and we stopped at Cold Stone for dessert beforehand. Of course we got there and then a group of teenagers walked in looking like a bubblegum quinceanera. I’ve never seen so much tulle outside of a Joann Fabrics. Tis the season for prom, I suppose. As we were walking to the car, Ken asked, “Can you imagine chaperoning for those kids?”
“No. I wouldn’t be caught dead at another prom.”
“I would! I’d be the one outside the bathrooms asking, ‘Young lady, did you leave a baby in that toilet?’”

So then we get to Overture Center for the performance and find that the other half of the center was rented out for a special event: prom. Only there were security guards to stand outside the bathrooms and ask inappropriate questions, instead of my husband who would probably wind up on a sex offender registry for telling dead baby jokes, knowing our luck.

If she's allowed to wear the joke in public, then I'm allowed to say it out loud.

Moving on to classier subjects (hah!), I’m a good sanding and another coat of paint away from refurbishing Jana’s crackhouse mannequin. Since this is going to be a fabulous gift for the Queen of NATurally Inappropriate herself, we decided to turn it into a wall mounted planter for her herb garden. The most inappropriate thing about her after that will be the placement of the pots. And if we’re being honest, it wil be more clothes than she was wearing when I got her.

And of course, I’m going to have to deliver this thing to her personally in Texas when it’s done because I’d cry if it broke in shipping. Which led to this conversation:

Me: So I think I’ll put a wide pot around her legs. I’ll leave the midriff bare so you can write on it, and I’ll add two smaller, round titty pots.

Nat: It’s going to be legit.

Me: Jana is going to be jealous that she didn’t accept my offer of a kid’s craft station. I be talented, yo.

Nat: So you’re going to have to carry that on a plane. And pretend like nothing is up. And get pics.

Me: Yes. Epic blog post coming in July.

Nat: Like, just stare at peeps like you’re just holding a shopping bag. It’s soooo fabulous.

I will, too. I may be getting a cavity search, but it will be my greatest blog ever.

I'll have to do something to commemorate such an important milestone.