I don’t think I fully realized how naive some people could be until I started shopping for another place to live recently. (I’m quite sure I’m very naive in my own ways).
The owner of this last place did quite a few things wrong. 4 things that really bothered me:
1. He arranged time for me to meet up with him one Sunday at 5PM. I call his cell phone, to no avail. I wait outside for 15 minutes. I finally get a return call at 9PM, and he tells me he left his cell phone at home and didn’t get home until 9PM. And when he scheduled the meeting with me, he didn’t realize it was Super Bowl weekend. So he went to work, went out with his friends for a bit, and just got back and checked his phone. OK fine, let me at least see the place… I didn’t want my disappointment to get in the way of a potentially good living situation.
2. He has a large, maybe 50″ standard definition TV sitting in the living. He tells me it doesn’t work, but for some reason tries to assure me that he’ll get the TV guy to fix it. But it costs $125 just for him to stop by, and repairing the TV would probably cost a part that costs $475. I then told him why don’t you just by a new widescreen HDTV instead? He then responds with fierce certainty that he doesn’t want to spend $3000 on a new TV. Then he talks about how he has the home entertainment system just the way he wants it, about how 15 years ago he purchased the TV and the 5.0 surround sound speaker. And while he’s speaking these words, you can see ever so slight but clear glimmers of a sly, boastful smirk developing around the corners of his eyes.
3. Music comes up because I don’t want him to think that I’m gonna be a complete hermit. I’m gonna create some muted ruckus between 9AM-9PM. Then he says oh yeah I have a guitar, too, and leads me to the liviing room, where he has a guitar in a gig bag. I still don’t quite know how he got it, but he doesn’t know how to play, and he doesn’t know the model. “But it’s a high end guitar,” he says.
4. He has triple play. So you have the option of either paying for your 1/3 portion of the triple play bill, or set up internet/cable/phone yourself. So I tell him that I don’t need the phone, can I just pay for 1/3 portion of the internet/cable bill only? He says he doesn’t want to be an accountant, so he can’t do that. He likes having a landline phone so he can come home, listen to the messages and respond accordingly. I ask him who uses the phone in the house? He says it’s just him.
Again, I hate it when people (I’m not exempt from this, by the way) pretend to know more than they actually do.
1. Why the hell do you have a cell phone if you’re just gonna leave it at home? He doesn’t have a work cell phone, didn’t carry my contact info with him… just completely forgot about the schedule. And he told me that he couldn’t call me to cancel because he didn’t have my contact info with me. The worst part of it is, it’s not like he forgot to carry his cell phone. He leaves it home, from time to time, he says. Doesn’t like carrying it around.
2. Please don’t boast about some tube TV with egregiously rounded edges from the 1980s. Even if it’s huge, its picture quality cannot match anything in the lowest end of the market to this day. And you could purchase a very good 42″ TV for $600 if you try hard enough. And what the hell, boasting about a 5.0 surround sound? Completely meaningless to me if it’s not a 5.1 (the x.1 denotes subwoofer, the 5.x denotes number of speakers)
3. How the hell do you know it’s a high-end guitar if you have no idea what the model is? And your reason then for putting that high-end guitar leaning against the wall so haphazardly in a cheap gig bag is? Enough said.
4. I’m not in the business of subsidizing one man’s infatuation over a dying immobile communications technology, the landline. You don’t have to be an accountant to be able to calculate 1/3+1/3+0/3 of the triple play option.