Lamentations

My husband and I have been landlords for nearly five years. We have gone to great effort…and expense…to provide our tenants with a decent place to live at a reasonable rent. We spray for insects regularly, have a professional builder on call for maintenance, have installed solar water heating, new carpeting, and were honest with them about the property and its advantages and disadvantages at the time we showed it for rental. We have a “code of conduct” for our tenants so that they know what we…and their neighbours…expect from them in terms of behaviour (and actually evicted a tenant who was making life miserable for the others) and a nice, tight lease that is written to fairly spell out the legal obligations of all parties involved.

When general maintenance and repairs are needed, we always let the tenants know. The last thing we want is a tenant to die of fright upon seeing a stranger climbing up onto her roof, or a maintenance worker shot as he begins taking out a cracked window! We generally put the maintenance person directly in touch with the tenant who needs work and allow them to schedule work at their mutual convenience…then there is no concern for anyone’s safety or peace of mind.

For the past five months we have been tenants and, sadly, our experience has been one that illustrates the old saw “no good deed goes unpunished.” For as good a landlord as we have been, so our landlord is as bad.

As you all know, I am laid up with a broken foot. I saw the doctor two days ago and she declined the cortisone shot and told me “more anti-inflammatories, more pain meds, more elevating that foot.” The good news is that I am allowed to walk around some…the bad news is that I still have to spend the lion’s share of my time in bed with my foot propped up. It was from this position this morning that I heard a lot of strange mechanical noises outside my window and, when I went to check…at the insistence of my barking Yorkchop…that I discovered a man propping a tall ladder against the side of my house!!

After a moment of panic…the maid has the day off and she has gone shopping and my husband is out of town until tomorrow night…I looked down to see a drop cloth spread across the grass with a paint roller on it. In the grass nearby, however, was a hammer…why do you need a hammer to paint?? No arrangements were made with me or my husband for maintenance work to be done on the house and when the man with the ladder moved into my line of sight, I did not recognize him. He might have been the regular maintenance guy from next door, but from my angle on the second floor, I could not really tell.

Our landlord lives in Cape Town but this is a reasonably modern country and there are both conventional and cell telephonic communication between here and there. Even in the best of circumstances, I expect to be notified when people who do not live here are coming onto the property…I don’t live in an apartment building with a maintenance crew, I live in a private house with elaborate security systems…should I not be alarmed when a man I don’t recognize and am not expecting, props a ladder against my house?

So I called the landlord and said “Who is this person outside in my garden with a ladder propped up against the house near my bedroom?”

And he said “I don’t know.”

Which just freaked me out even more. Obviously the gardener let the guy in, but nobody knocked on the door, called me on the phone or even hollered up through the window to let me know there was work going on. Nope…my Yorkie starts barking like a loon, I go to check out what is fretting her, and find a ladder propped against my house where someone can peer in through the bedroom window and see me, in my skimpy nightie (I am still running my A/C during the day) with my foot propped up on the bed. And my landlord didn’t send the guy??

“I have a broken foot and I am laid up in bed,” I tell the landlord. “I am here alone…the maid has the day off. And this ladder is propped right where someone can see through the only uncurtained window in the bedroom and look right in at the bed. Nobody called me, nobody told me there was going to be work going on today!”

“Maybe it is Leo,” the landlord says, mentioning the handyman from next door.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell from up here. But if it IS Leo, he needs to make an appointment with us to come over to do work, and when he does, he needs to keep the appointments he makes. We kissed off an entire Saturday a few weeks back waiting for him and he didn’t show.” What I didn’t tell the landlord is that Leo told me that he works for our cantankerous neighbour as a man-of-all-work from Monday through Friday and can only do maintenance work here on Saturdays…and today ain’t Saturday.

The landlord tries to call Leo but there is no answer. He calls me back. “Try the gardener,” I suggest. “He’s here today.” The gardener is here on alternate Thursdays at the landlord’s behest, since our maid does the gardening for us and we refused to pay two people to do the yard work or to reduce the maid’s wages by cutting her gardening day. I wait a while, but the landlord does not call me back…I don’t know what is happening, if the guy outside is Leo or not, if he is authorized by the landlord to be here or not, if my growing fear for my safety is groundless or not.

Finally, Hubby calls me. He has called the landlord on my behalf and the news is 1) the guy with the ladder is Leo, 2) the landlord did not send him over here today, 3) the landlord has told him to leave, and 4) I, gimpy foot, nightgown and all, am supposed to go down the stairs and make an appointment with Leo to return to do the work, whatever it is (even the landlord doesn’t know!). I decline this last bit because 1) I am in my night clothes (I am in bed, after all), 2) my foot hurts and I have just taken a pain pill, 3) the last time I did this, Leo simply didn’t show up at the appointed time, and 4) I am not even sure he understands my American-accented English…or if he is particularly sharp with any brand of English at all.

I don’t want to deal with all this confusion. I barely slept last night and this insomnia and its aftermath are very new to me…I have never EVER had trouble sleeping before this foot thing and in the past two months I’ve had only two or three nights of more than 4 hours sleep at a pop. I’m tired, I’m getting cranky, and the last thing I need is strange men climbing up ladders to my bedroom window and scaring the willies out of me! I just want to sit here with my foot propped up and wait for my pain pill to work, and not have to worry about strangers propping ladders up against my house and climbing in through a window or over the balcony railing.

Most of all, however, I want my landlord to get his act together and behave responsibly and with concern for something more than having the rent arrive in a timely manner (which it always does). We were mislead about this house from the beginning: it is smaller than we were told (sorry, but the patio, balcony, and garage are not part of the square footage of the house), it was infested with vermin when we moved in and the landlord knew it, the front security gate malfunctions regularly, something else the landlord was aware of (revealed to us by the gate repairman on one of his many, many visits). The landlord knew that the electricity supply to this street was unreliable…the neighbour across the road told us it was notoriously unreliable and the landlord lived in this very house until just this last December. We’ve had the exterminators out here more than once but we continue to have evidence of rats, I’ve seen fat, happy cockroaches gambolling in my cupboards, and if you want to have meat in this house, get out the Raid and lock all the doors and windows because the minute so much as a piece of lunch meat comes out of the refrigerator, the flies show up in swarms…even after the house and grounds were sprayed.

I would not allow my tenants to live this way, and I go out of my way to make sure their homes are comfortable, clean, safe places to live. When our hot water heater went on the fritz, the landlord would not even take our phone calls after the first one! Steaming water poured down the chandelier in the stairway and cascaded down the stairs like a water fall, a sheet of hot water poured out of the eaves and blocked access to the front door , scalding the plants on either side of the door, and our landlord would not respond to our SMSs or voicemails. We had to call his mother , who authorized a plumber to come out.

Add to this the local infrastructure problems: five water main breaks in four months, each one leaving us without water; two trash collector’s strikes; weekly power outages; and last Friday night someone set the vacant lot behind my street afire, menacing the entire neighbourhood, and the fire brigade, when my husband tried to call to report the fire, put him on hold!

Joburg is no fun. Aside from movies, one casino, and malls, there’s pretty much nothing to do here, and the infrastructure is totally unworthy of a city that thinks it is the be-all and end-all of Western civilization on the continent of Africa. There are pot holes in the posh sections of town you could easily lose a wheel in (no exaggeration!), the traffic lights are so notorious for not functioning that one of our car insurance companies has hired and trained “pointsmen” (non-police traffic directors) to put in intersections when the lights aren’t working to reduce traffic accidents…apparently it is cheaper to train and pay these pointsmen than to pay for collision damage! Street lights don’t work, malls shut down at 5 or 6 pm on weeknights, and few are open after 2 on Sundays or at all on public holidays.

I still don’t like it here…it is a crappy place to live…but it would be improved if I wasn’t stuck with a landlord who is barely one cut above a slumlord. This guy cares about the property looking good, but seems not to give a fig for its functionality or the well-being of those of us who must live here.

I want to go back to Cape Town. I really, really, do.

Vermin

I bought my first house in 1975 and for 35 years have been the mistress of my own domain. Aside from the positive emotional aspects that owning your own home brings you, there are undeniable practical advantages, chief among them being you are not at someone else’s mercy when something goes wrong.

Hubby and I own rental property in Cape Town and we have always tried to be the kind of landlord we would hope to have, should we ever have the misfortune to be renters. Well…the misfortune happened in January and, unfortunately, we did not end up with a landlord like us.

We are renting a relatively new (less than ten years old) house in what is known around here as a “posh” suburb. I don’t know about you, but there are certain things I automatically assume in such areas, among them a relatively high degree of safety and security, cleanliness, privacy, civility, and well-kept properties. These are things I am willing to pay a higher rent to have…and in my rental house, I do. Problem is, I’m not getting what I am paying for.

Our landlord gave us a paper with useful numbers on it when we moved in…they live in Cape Town now, so we need numbers of people to contact for emergencies. It seemed a little odd to me that there was the number for the person who repairs the motor for the automated driveway gate…there was no number for the garage door opener guy or a plumber or a drain company…why the driveway gate? But with the stresses of moving in, I thought nothing of it and focussed on more immediate concerns.

One of the first things I noticed were the flies…omigod, the flies! They were everywhere! Hordes of them! I found them in my refrigerator (apparently sneaked in while the door was open) I found them in the oven door, between the two sheets of glass. I took to using more kitchen towels to cover exposed food that I used for drying hands and dishes. I could not cut a slice of bread without the flies swarming me, demanding their tribute. My landlord professed ignorance when I lodged a complaint.

The mosquitoes were awful…I am allergic to mosquito bites and the bite that makes a little bump on you and itches uncomfortably for a day or two gives me a red swelling two or three inches across that itches like my skin is on fire for ten days or more. But mosquitoes are a fact of life in Africa, even in expensive, posh suburbs, because nobody here has a clue about screens. Instead, we plug little aerosol misters into the wall and they emit a toxic vapour into the room to kill the little buggers if they come in. Unfortunately, the lure of my pale, plump, succulent flesh seemed to overwhelm even their death throes, and the little buggers continued feasting on me, even after we had installed two different brands of mosquito vaporizers in the bedroom.

Then, a couple of weeks after moving in, I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night only to find a rather large cockroach gazing at me from the front of the toilet tank. Before I could raise the alarm and kill the little monster, it fled behind the tank, doubtless wondering what the feck I was doing up running around during what should have been his personal time. It was not long before I was finding roach droppings and eggs in the bowls and pots…I grew up in a roach-infested house near the beach in San Diego…I know ’em when I see ’em!

The bites got worse…some of them healed in a couple of weeks but others turned blackish purple and after the blister in the centre broke, a deep pit formed. Today, nearly three months after moving into this house of horrors, many those bites still have not fully healed…they are shrinking in size but a nasty purple scar remains. We began spraying a moat of insecticide on the carpet around the bed and spraying the bed and mattress each time we changed the sheets, thinking maybe it was something actually in the bed, but when the maid came to me with similar bites, and her bedroom is down the hall (and we don’t share bedding) I knew it was something else.

And then, outside under the patio cover, we spotted it…a large spider nest that was open on one side…there had been a spider hatch just below the main bedroom balcony, to which there are doors and windows from the bedroom. We actually suffered three successive waves of these biting spider attacks, the maid’s room only being attacked in the second one, so I suspect there were three spider nests that hatched within weeks of each other, the spiderlings taking refuge from our great bird population by coming indoors. These, then, are the purple bites with the blistered centres…spider bites, most likely yellow sac spiders. We keep them out of the bed by spraying every time we change the linens, but I see little spiders on the interior walls of the house almost every day.

The Yorkie has spent most of the last three months fretting at the baby gate at the front door, frantically beseeching me to open the gate and let her out to chase down the rodent she was convinced was hanging around out there. While we were still unpacking, the maid found rodent droppings on the patio where they had chewed their way through a trash bag full of packing paper, and we found evidence of the beasties on the front doorstep. But a few weeks ago, while standing in the driveway, I saw a rat run out from under my car and disappear into the hydrangeas beneath the scullery window. And where there is 1 rat, there are more.

So, a few weeks ago the landlord was in town and he stopped to visit. My first concern was the insect life in this house but I was totally unprepared for his blasé attitude: when I said I had seen cockroaches, his reply was “Oh, yes, you will see roaches here.” Excuse me? The man knew the house had roaches and he let us move in 1) without warning us and 2) without spraying for them? What?? Now my belongings have roaches…I moved in here roach-free (we had our house sprayed every 6 months or so…we lived near a marshland and roaches are common in such places) but I’m afraid I may not move out in the same condition.

He professed puzzlement at the fly problem, saying he’d never noticed much of a problem. Well, I guess he’s never bothered to look at the light fixtures in the kitchen and scullery ceilings, which are literally full of dead flies! And I don’t think he believed me about the rat at all. But he promised to send out an exterminator company to do a quotation.

Three weeks passed and the company came, did their assessment and went. Still no exterminator. Meanwhile the driveway gate goes on the fritz, necessitating a call to the gate guy on the list…ten days, three call outs, and multiple parts swaps later, we find this is an on-going problem in this house, and that is why his name and phone number are on the list. This particular motor was installed last November, a replacement for another, even less reliable motor.

We have had a terrible problem with the doors and locks. On the day we moved in, one of the furniture movers got locked in the guest bathroom because the lock doesn’t work properly. He had to hand the key out the bathroom window to Hubby, who was able to unlock the door from the outside. The door from the dining room to the patio would not close properly…it had to be slammed…which knocked a sensor for the alarm system off the door and broke the interior of the lock, leaving us with a door to the outside that could not be locked and an alarm sensor precariously reattached with tape. The front door had to be shouldered open and the doors to the balcony could be opened, but it took my husband and his 100kg+ frame to pull them closed enough to latch and lock. Our landlord instructed the handyman (who lives next door) to come and fix the doors, which he almost did…he fixed the front door, he half-fixed the dining room door, and didn’t touch the balcony doors at all. This last, however, may be a good thing because, when the landlord was out there with his father just recently, a wasp took umbrage to their close proximity to his nest…right beside the door!...that it stung the landlord’s father. That could have been a tragic event if it had been me, as allergic as I am to stings. It would have been nice if we had been forewarned that this was a possibility, however, so that I could get a bee kit!

Power is a bit of a testy topic in South Africa these days, and I was dismayed to find my electricity unexpectedly going off several times a week. We weren’t sure if we were putting an undue strain on the house’s electrical capacity and ultimately asked the man across the road who told us that reliability of the electricity supply was poor in this area. So, for nearly three months I am enduring unexpected power outages of unpredictable duration several times a week. Ya think the landlord might have warned us about this?

Then there was the hot water heater’s repeated boilovers when we went out of town ten days ago. My poor maid, who was left to housesit (which she loved…she got the big screen all to herself for four whole days!) called me at noon on Saturday to report “water is everywhere!” Do you think the landlord or his wife answered our frantic telephone calls or SMSs? Not a one. Ultimately the maid got the handyman from next door to show her how to shut the thing off and when we returned on Monday…after more futile attempts to reach the landlord…we called his mommy who called a plumber for us and got the mess sorted out.

But as we pulled into the driveway on Monday afternoon, the car boot full of groceries, to see a wall of steaming water cascading off the porch roof…and the driveway gate choosing just that moment to again fail…I finally lost my patience. The following day Hubby and I drafted a letter to the landlord enumerating our complaints and, basically, saying that if he didn’t take some swift action, we would either fix the problems ourselves and deduct it from the rent or we would start looking for another rental. Amazingly, the man who could not return our telephone calls or respond to our texts for a week or more, got back to Hubby in less than half an hour after the email was sent! It was all a big misunderstanding, he says, he’ll look into it…

And so now the gate seems to be fixed…and the handyman will be here Saturday to fix the doors…and tomorrow the exterminators are due to arrive.

Just in time, too...last Saturday morning when Hubby went out to feed the dogs, there at the bottom of the steps was a very dead and thoroughly chewed rat. Pretty little Candy, who looks like a dainty white poodle, is part Jack Russell and I suspect this rat’s attempts to help himself to her bowl of midnight snack kibble wasn’t exactly to her liking...and she let him know it with deadly effect.

So, by tomorrow evening our house should have received a radical verminectomy…bug spraying and rodent traps should help a lot. But I am a loss as to who to call to help us with that landlord…

Eeek! I’ve got a parasite! I’ve picked up a troll!

It is one of the unfortunate facts that, without proper precautions, we can inadvertently pick up all manner of unpleasant little things as we make our journey through life. From leeches to lice, from tapeworms to ticks, from fleas to STDs, by living a life devoid of appropriate protection, we can pick up a host of unwanted diseases and parasites.

When I set up my blog I decided to enable anonymous comments because I didn’t want to lock out people who didn’t have Blogger accounts. At first I didn’t moderate the comments but after suffering an outbreak of comment spam a few years ago, I set the comments to be moderated so I could keep it out of my comments.

Despite opening the blog to anonymous comments, however, I do have standards. I don’t allow insults or ad hominem attacks, but legitimate criticism is published. What is “legitimate criticism?” you ask? Well, that brings me to the point of this blog entry…this month, after five years of blogging, I picked up my first troll.

On 7 July I found this anonymous comment awaiting moderation: “Terrible writing. Sorry. Just being honest.” I didn’t publish it, categorizing the remark as lacking legitimacy. Had the author expanded on her comment and given solid reasons that she considered my writing to be terrible, then it would have been published. This, however, was more properly classified as baiting, an attempt to draw me into an argument, the flippant “just being honest” tag giving it away. I deleted the comment and forgot about it.

Yesterday, however, I received this comment: “You CAN'T write! This is not to be "published," (since we wouldn't want to be on your blog!), just to advise you to stop polluting the internet with your non-writing!” Well, aside from the fact that this was unmistakably a personal attack, the author firmly established herself as an agent provocateur, with a comment that was both off-topic and clearly baiting. And, considering that this juvenile attempt at insult was posted to the same entry as the first transparent attempt to provoke a fight, it’s clear that not only have I picked up a troll, I have picked up a stalker troll. Not content to have done the typical troll’s hit and run, she has returned to see if I took the bait and upon seeing I hadn’t she left some more.

I’m honoured. I am finally initiated into the ranks of true bloggers, having acquired my very own bit of internet vermin, a real troll! And an anonymous revisiting troll, at that! (Those, I am told, are the pinnacle of trolldom, the ones who love you so much they keep coming back and are too shy…or cowardly…to reveal themselves, preferring to remain secret admirers.)

It is my own fault, of course, for not using the simplest of internet prophylaxis, disabling anonymous comments. And I may have to eventually go that route to prevent the troll from getting out of hand…they are not known for their wisdom or circumspection, after all. But if I do that, I’ll leave a dedicated email address for anonymous comments…and then I’ll be able to trace my little troglodyte admirer back to her cave and thank her for making my day.


Troll photo by Patsemchism, Flickr