one point i'll concede to the freepers

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posted by tom / August 09, 2004 /

Mme. F— is French, which is why I'm spelling her name that way. She's tiny, pragmatic in a forceful way, and doesn't realize how old she is. She seemed nice enough when we moved in: she talked a lot about how this would be our home, and she'd respect it as such. And she let us sweep the place out from under some girls who'd wanted to start the lease a month later. At the time I didn't appreciate that this kindness to us was a cruelty to someone else. Mme. F— is a zero-sum kind of lady.

Now that our lease is ending, the claws have come out. It's always a sneak attack: we'll get a phone call about something or other, which will end with, "Oh, by the way, I suggest you use the place up the street to buy your grout when you retile the bathrooms." Okay. Wait, what?

The problem is that she's objectively right about most of this stuff. Yes, Jon and I did chop wood on the slate tiles outside and crack them. Okay, we shouldn't have put screws in the ceiling for our blacklight beer pong table last Halloween. Cutting holes in the heating system to run ethernet cable was, perhaps, of questionable propriety.

I just wish she'd cut us some slack. Is she so surprised to find that a bunch of guys in their twenties don't have the same enthusiasm for weeding and pruning that a sixtysomething female property owner does? Is it really necessary that we have the carpets professionally dry-cleaned, rather than renting a steam-cleaner? Why are we culpable for the damage caused by a squirrel trying to chew through one of the screens? We don't control the squirrels, you know. And if we did, you would have bigger problems than a chewed-up screen, lady. Just give us our goddamn deposit back already.

I work myself into a frenzy trying to prep the house whenever a visit/inspection is imminent, and then am irritated when my efforts are inevitably deemed lacking. She was here all day today, having brough some Spanish guys over to mulch the backyard. She immediately locked her keys in her car and ended up puttering around the yard for eight hours, supervising those poor South American bastards and finding fault with our dedication to the gardening arts. This was a bit much for my tastes. I ended up yelling at her after she cut me off for four consecutive sentences.

This aggravation is probably not worth the hundred bucks or so that I might lose if things go really seriously wrong, but for some reason I can't actually make myself write the whole business off.