Pages

Monday, June 27, 2011

#24 Gym Conversation

Preface: I am writing this on the eve of my 30th birthday, in which I am in a state of moderate depression,  looking back at how my 20's went; contemplative about youth in general. 

Entry: We have a gym in the building.  It's a standard, no frills gym with your usual machines, weights, and a two-person wooden sauna.  It sounds fancy and Euro, right?  It's not.  It's just a hot box.  I hate being up there when other tenants are in there. Usually, I'm trying to work out, and they're just complaining to me about general and personal shit.  There's also those awkward non-verbal acknowledgements and small talk about working out. I hate it.

The last time I went to workout, there was someone in the sauna singing R&B... and not well.  I thought "that's embarrassing" and got on the elliptical.  A minute in, this guy comes out of the sauna (in street clothing, not gym attire) and asks me,
"Hey, do you know about music?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Can you listen to me sing this and tell me what you think of the lyrics? I gotta turn this song in tomorrow to Trey Songz's producer.  He said it's gonna be a hit."
And he starts to sing this R&B song that he's reading from a crumbled up piece of paper. I can't understand a word he's saying, but from what I can tell, it's the standard, terrible slow-jam rhetoric about sex.  After he's done singing, he stares at me, waiting for a response.  I ask to see his lyrics.

Now in my hand is this notebook paper of chicken scratch and spelling errors of a song titled "Beautiful Romance":
"I'm gon put your hed on a pillow...make you look rite like a bow tie...you gonna be mine..." the usual affair.  I actually give this dude real criticism:
"You know, the subject isn't anything special, and the guy is basically saying he wants to have sex with this girl, and is that the beautiful romance?  Are you going to hand this to him, because you should type it and present it well.  Also, "right like a bow tie," what does that even mean?  Is it because you are trying to rhyme with a word that sounds like "tie"?  You should rethink that..."
"Yeah, you're right, I want to make people think..."
He then goes on and on about how he's a song-writer, a producer, a dancer, developing a vodka where the bottle turns into a bong, and 'working on' owning a few casinos.  He also said he's writing a script, and that he's an actor.
"Oh, I'm an actor, too.  I am the manager of this building, so I don't have to pay rent and which allows me to be an actor."
"Oh yeah?  What are you in? I don't live in this building. I live in the building down the street. I come to this gym because it's quieter than my gym, and it lets me concentrate."
"How do you get in here if you don't live here?"
"Do you know Jewel Arms?  He's my friend that lets me in.  I also don't have to pay rent either.  It's because I live with my mom.  I'm 16."

By now, 15 minutes have gone by.  (I know this since I'm on a timed elliptical.)  For 15 minutes, I've been talking to a 16 year old like a fucking adult.  I just thought he was stupid, turns out, he's stupid because he's an idiot teenager.  The moment he tells me his age, I switch into a different mode:
"You gotta finish school, and go to college, kid!...What do you know about romance anyway?....Maybe you should start small like, aspire to buy a house before you buy a casino...save your money."
I continue telling this kid lessons of life, and by then an additional 15 minutes have gone by, and I've finished my cardio.  
Turns out, the best way to pass time while exercising is talking to a clueless, name-dropping 16 year old.
I have no idea who this is.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

#23 Tammy the Tattletale

As I mentioned in the last post, my building is in the shape of a rectangle with half the units facing out and the other half facing in, where their view is looking through the windows of other units.  It's not a great view.  Sound travels and bounces against the walls in the interior court.  If a baby is talking by an open window, everyone with an open window can hear it.  It's especially annoying when people have parties.  I get babies crying about interior neighbor noise, as this is the mundane awfulness that I have to deal with on the daily.

There is a girl named Tammy that lives in the interior that has recently found out my email, and has decided to bitch about everything.  She's the one that complained about the smell of her neighbor below her that is grilling on his patio, and the smell and smoke of the grill goes into her unit.  She has become the building tattletale.  She's also found out when I get enough complaints about a baby and their noise, I have to slip them a warning and then fine them after a second offense. 
Tammy has taken it upon herself to be the interior unit police, emailing me at any point in time whenever she hears a noise that bothers her and telling me to fine them.  She's emailed me at all times, like 7pm to 2am, or whatever time she hears a disturbance.  Tammy has become oversensitive and obsessive with noise.  I found her on my floor the other day because she was investigating a noise she heard.  When speaking to her about it, her dog peed in the hall.
"I'll clean that" she says.  (I checked back a few minutes later, and she did).

Tammy isn't a bad person.  She's just irritating.  Here is a snippet from one of her long-winded emails:
"If this noise continues, I'm gonna need you to move us to an outer unit with the same square feet and same rent, because this is something that (not you) but the management failed to inform me before I signed the lease and expecting this to be a quality building, which it was until lately..."
Right, like that's how it works.  As if this is a hotel, and I accidentally put you in a smoking room.  It's not that easy, bitch.  I know I call them babies, but I can't tell grown ass adults how to live their lives. I can only reiterate rules.  She's been living here for over two years, not a peep from her before this month.    

I get it.  When something happens to you, you feel as if you should do something about it, but bitching to me is not the solution.  It just makes me hate you. You know what the solution is?  Get the fuck out of my face and move.  
This bitch is, like, 30.
 

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

#22 Shit

Well THIS just happened.

On Tuesdays, the resident manager next door has her day off, so I take her phone.  One of her babies calls me at 7:45pm to let her in because she got locked out.  She agreed to pay, so I get my keys and head to the sister building next door.

On my way out of my alley door, I see a homeless zombie with his pants down squatting against the trash room door, and just before I could say anything, he had a projectile shit on the door.
I am incredulous.
"ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? WHY WOULD YOU JUST SHIT ON A BUILDING?  CAN'T YOU FIND A TREE?  WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?...."
It goes on, and all the while, he continues to shit his runny ass shit as it's hitting my building's trash room door and falling to the ground.  He was saying something to me in Spanish as a response or a rebuttal, but I couldn't understand him, so I just continued to berate him.
"GODDAMN IT.  GO AWAY.  WHY WOULD YOU CHOOSE THIS BUILDING? WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?  I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.  WHY ARE YOU STILL GOING?  STOP SHITTING!  I HATE YOU!"

I then run into the lobby to see if Naseem the security guard sees him on the camera and his response is,
"Oh, that happens all the time.  I just take a bucket and wash it away.  It's usually women homeless that do that against the building..."  He's so casual about it.

I walk back into the alley to go into the other building to let the next door baby in, and I see the remains of my interaction with the homeless man.  This image is now ingrained into my brain.  I thought about taking a picture for you guys, but I don't want to subject you to it.
I have ideas in my head about what I could have done to keep him from shitting, like push him over while he was in that position.  Then again, I would have probably caught a glimpse of his dirty homeless ass AS he was shitting and falling over, so maybe it was a good thing I didn't do that.

After I let the baby next door into her unit, I am still shocked and grossed out.  I head back out through the alley and Naseem has already rinsed it away.  It's not even his job, but he does it.  I go to his security desk to ask him how he did it so quickly, and when I get there, I see he's watching the security footage of me yelling at the homeless guy for entertainment.

I'm so disturbed.
I took this  picture with my camera phone of the security camera screen, so it's not the best quality, but you get the idea.  It looks like I'm trying to reason with him, but I didn't want to get too close to him.  I felt like I was right in front of his face, though.

Monday, June 13, 2011

#21 Non-Adventures (Annoyances) in Babysitting

This job sucks so much ass, that I can't even find the humor in it anymore.  It literally sucks the fucking life out of me where I feel numb, and anyone that's ever had a job they hated, you know what I'm talking about.  This post is a little disjointed, but these are all recent annoyances.

It was the beginning of the month, and the FIRST IS THE WORST.  It's the time where I have to deal with all the babies that moved out and assessing their units, and charging them, to which they get mad when I charge them.  What the fuck do you expect when you leave your place like a shit hole?
The first is also the time when I have to deal with counting, what seems like, thousands of checks.  Roommates are the worst when it comes to this because they give me multiple checks at different times.
For example, I have these babies that live in a tiny two bedroom, there's four of them, they are all students.  This is what their checks look like:


$422.25?  I don't even know how they came to figure this out amongst themselves.  I have to take the extra step of using a calculator.  Now the idea of simple arithmetic annoys me .  Go live in a fucking dorm.  Plus, I think they're trying to pull a fast one and short me a quarter.  That'll teach me. 
But really, who wouldn't want to use those Hello Kitty checks?
------------
Babies have also taken it upon themselves to throw shit out of their windows.  The building is shaped like a rectangle, and half of the units' windows face the interior, which is a view of their neighbor across the courtyard.  They've taken the liberty to act like it's Ancient Rome and just throw shit out of their windows into the patios of the people that live in the interior court.  It's mainly hundreds of cigarettes, but the list also includes drum sticks, tax documents, beer cans, someone's cat (granted, this cat probably leapt to it's death, but for the sake of this story, I'm going to saying someone threw a dead cat out a window).  Many a baby has bitched to me about not wanting to clean someone else's mess, and that I need to do it. (Fuck you, you entitled assholes) To which I just post a sign about how you shouldn't throw things out of your window.  I have to actually tell these motherfuckers to not litter.

Speaking of cats, the high class hooker move out.  She got 'laid off', which...using that wording, is very confusing.  How does one lose their job as a prostitute?  Does she get a severance?  I guess the opposite for her job is to get 'laid on'? Anyway, she left her place really clean, but it reeks of cat.  Ugh...cats.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Happy Anniversary, You Terrible Goddamn Job

This doesn't deserve a blog number.  I just want to mark this day as my one-year anniversary with this stupid place full of over-privileged babies.
It's not even a commemoration.  It's more marking the day you noticed you have a wart on your arm that you've been picking at for a year now.  You hate it, but you live with it...until the day you decide to burn the fucking place down, or..wait, what?  I meant freeze it off.  I'm sticking with wart references. 
It was either a burning building or a frozen wart, and that shit is gross, so I went with this photo. Seriously, google "Frozen Wart" and you will not be happy with your decision.
 
Copyright (c) 2010 being a building manager is awful. Design by WPThemes Expert

Blogger Templates and RegistryBooster.