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The Landlord Blues
The Landlord Blues
To para-phrase Jim Croche, I got them thoroughly depressin', low-down, mind- messin', mechanically-inept landlord blues.
I don’t know about you, but no matter how far I have come in my quest for patience and positive thinking, I often discover just how much farther I have to go to reach Nirvana. (No. I’m not talking about anybody named Cobain here.) I am pretty much a natural-born pessimist who has to work almost constantly to engender a positive outlook on life. (It keeps me humble when I realize that I am still a flawed human being with great distances yet to travel.)
On the other hand, I am SO IMPRESSED with that positive plane of consciousness on which Mary Ellen lives, and, it seems, she doesn’t even have to work on herself to achieve and maintain that level. It just comes naturally to her. And sometimes her bright, cheery, wonderful countenance…just pisses me off in spades.
Being the dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon that I am, it ain’t always easy for me to be married to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Okay, enough of the prelude. Here’s what happened.
Mary Ellen and I own property in Maine in the little town of Harpswell Neck. This sleepy little lobstering burg is situated on beautiful Casco Bay. We bought the property about five years ago when the original owner passed away. The property consists of a little over an acre of land with two houses on it. One house, the older one, consists of two living units (apartments) which we lease out on yearly agreements. The other house, the newer one, is an A-frame-like structure with a loft that affords a breath-taking view of Casco Bay. (It is there that I do a lot of my writing.)
Anyway, we’ve got a new tenant named Joan. Joan just moved into the upstairs unit last week. On Thursday, Mary Ellen got a phone call from her saying that the refrigerator in the apartment died.
Okay, we’ll replace it. We’ve got an agreement with a local appliance store who delivers. No problem.
About an hour later, Mary Ellen gets phone call from our handyman next-door neighbor in Maine, Jimmy. (Jimmy looks after the place for us, and is probably the most mechanically inclined person I’ve ever met in my life.) Jimmy told Mary Ellen that Joan just called him because every one of electrical wall outlets in her apartment is dead. (However, every light switch in the place still works.) He said that he went up there and flipped all of the circuit breakers, AND . . . nothing happened.
He also said that Joan told him that the town housing authority, who subsidizes Joan’s rent, came through the place the other day for an inspection. It was during their electrical inspection that the electrical circuits bit the dust. Jimmy figured that during the inspection, the housing authority tripped a couple of GFI socket breakers, causing the problem.
A GFI socket is that type of electrical socket, usually in your bathroom, that has the "test" and "reset" buttons between the two plugs. It is actually a safety device to protect you from getting electrocuted in case you do something stupid like, say, drop the plugged-in curling iron into the toilet. When something like that occurs, and the curling iron is plugged in to a GFI socket, the breaker in the socket trips, killing power to that outlet and every other outlet that is connected to it. The fix to the problem is simple – 1. Unplug the curling iron, 2. Fish said curling iron out of the toilet, and 3. Hit the "reset" button the GFI socket.
Not a problem, right?
Well, there is if you can’t find the freaking GFI socket!
Jimmy said that , we Joan called him, he came up and scoured the apartment. After about an hour of searching, he found one GFI socket…in a walk-in closet off of the master bedroom! (Come to find out, that closet used to be a bathroom before the original owner remodeled and re-wired everything in the apartment.) When Jimmy hit the "reset" button on the GFI, half of the electrical sockets in the apartment came to life.
Problem half-solved!
However, half of the sockets, including the one that fridge was connected to, were still dead.
Now, Joanie had just moved into the place the day before, and there were boxes of crap everywhere in the place, lining the walls of the apartment. Jimmy and Joanie walked around the entire apartment attempting to move furniture and heavy boxes in order to get a clear view of all of the walls. (Now, mind you, this is a BIG apartment – a kitchen, dining room, living room, bed room, pantry, full bath, and a bedroom with a HUGE walk-in closet!) None of the outlets that they found was a GFI socket.
Jimmy said that he looked for hours that night and came up empty.
So, Mary Ellen and I were forced to call a local electrician the next day (Friday). The fellow, Frank, said that he would check the place out immediately.
Surely, a licensed electrician would find something as rudimentary as a GFI socket!
RIGHT?
Of course not.
Frank, got back in touch with Mary Ellen and said that he had come up empty-handed. He said that he would go back into the place on Monday and search, but this wasn’t going to be a quick fix. (At $80.00 an hour, it wasn’t going to be a cheap fix either!) If he couldn’t find the stupid GFI, he would have to rewire at least half of the apartment!
When Mary relayed this information to me, my response was, "Okay. Nothing we can do about it. We’re at this guy’s mercy."
Mary’s response was, "Let’s go up there and find the GFI ourselves."
My counter- (and UNVOICED) response to that was, "Are you nuts? You want to travel four hours to look for something that Jimmy and a licensed electrician couldn’t find after literally HOURS of searching?"
My counter-(VOICED) response was, "Okay, dear."
However, I knew that this was going to amount to an exercise in futility, and that we were going to log about nine hours of driving in two days time, shoot a perfectly good weekend to hell, and then end up lining old Frank’s pockets anyway!
(To Be Continued…)
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posted on Aug 11, 2008 8:55 AM ()
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