Posted by leeran on April 28, 2003, at 11:43:15
In reply to Re: Attack of the Landladies » whiterabbit, posted by fayeroe on April 28, 2003, at 9:49:20
Oh gosh, Pat - I feel for you. I have always found landlords to be very intimidating. In my opinion, the word landlord connotes reckless power.
My most traumatic landlord experience was back in college.
My friend and I shared an apartment and the landlady sounds similar to yours (but we were in our late teens and very easy to intimidate). She was a rather stout women with with a beehive that skimmed door jambs. I did my best to avoid ever running into her.
Her maintenance man (also her husband) was a big burly guy who was afraid of her as well (everyone was). One afternoon he gave us the word that he would be turning off the water for several hours.
My roommate, who got stoned at the drop of a hat and would immediately follow a joint with ice cream, set the dirty bowl over the drain and turned on the water to rinse out the bowl. You can see where this is going . . .
We blithely took off to visit my husband (then boyfriend) at his fraternity house, since we didn't have any water in the apartment, and didn't return for hours.
When we did, the husband was waiting for us in our apartment. The overflowing sink had seeped into their apartment below . . . running in rivulets (or rivers?) behind his wife's red velvet Victorian wallpaper, coming dangerously close to ruining her antique doll collection.
My roommate (still stoned, kind of a perpetual state for her that eventually resulted in a parting of the ways) started laughing uncontrollably.
As usual, I was horrified (I use that word frequently as it describes my internal state in these types of situations) and since I wasn't stoned (always too afraid of getting caught - the original Bill Clinton non-inhaler), it was easier for him to direct his rightful anger toward me.
By the grace of God, the wife had gone to visit her mother overnight.
He promised he would never tell her and that he thought he had caught it in time, but at the end of the lecture (which I don't fault him for in the least, I would have felt the same way) he leaned over and grabbed my nose between his fingers, that still smelled like plumber's grease, and shook my head back and forth several times and said "but don't you ever, ever, ever do it again."
A few years later, I saw an article about him in the paper. He had gone out to a Norman Bates style hotel on the edge of town and used a gun to end it all.
poster:leeran
thread:222703
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030426/msgs/222908.html