useless and cheap! buy one now!

My landlord is very incompetent, as you might already know. For weeks and weeks now, we have been calling him about the leaky shower in my bathroom. This is not just a drip drip drip leak, this is a constant stream of water drip, so constant that you can hear the water run through the pipes from the hallway. For a while, the landlord just tried to appease me, with an empty promise that he would "come tomorrow" and never showing up. Then I told him that he actually pays our water bill and that seemed to wake him up.

Last week, I came home from work to find the contents of my closet strewn across my bed. Every piece of folded clothing (including all sixty five tank tops) had been taken out of the closet. And the closet itself? There were three large holes knocked into the walls, exposing the pipes beneath, halfheartedly covered with colored posterboard. Posterboard from my personal stock of school supplies sitting behind my desk, posterboard which I had purchased with my own money. There were shards of plaster on the floor and not a single indication that the holes would be fixed up soon. I called the landlord, livid.

Two days later, when we actually spoke, he explained that there was a second pipe in the wall that he wanted to replace and so was waiting for that before he sealed up the wall again. But my closet, my clothes, I want to sleep in my bed, I protested. He told me he would do it after the weekend, after chag, which meant Wednesday. Two days ago.

I returned from New York Thursday morning and was not really all that surprised to see that nothing had been done to the closet, so I left a message on the landlord's machine. He did not return my call. This afternoon, I called him a second time and demanded that he come over and patch up the walls. He informed me that he was actually going to wait until I moved out to change the other pipe, so he didn't want to patch the wall and then break it down later. That's in several months, I argued, and the wall is OPEN TO THE GROUND, dirty, and I can't put my clean clothes and towels back in. You need to fix it, I insisted.

So the landlord comes over, armed with a mini hammer and a piece of cardboard. Torn from a box. That he then proceeds to hammer into the wall to cover the open space. Rediculous, right? Especially because ONE OF THE CARDBOARD PIECES HAS HOLES IN IT. That makes me especially assured that bugs won't crawl from the basement into my closet.

Surprise, surprise, landlord runs out of cardboard before he patches the top hole. He tells me this fact, as if that's that, and I demand that he cover it. That's where I put my clean towels, I say. Well, what can I do? he shrugs, and then adds that maybe he can use my yellow posterboard to cover the hole. I very sternly say no, that is what I use for school. I actually have to repeat this line because he keeps protesting, asking me how much it really costs. (How much does plywood really cost, huh?) I get on the phone so that he can't argue anymore, and when he finishes I see that he has nailed in two scraps of cardboard side by side, edges of the box he had brought over.

It's like we're living in the 1940s and I have no money since I stay at home with the kids and I guess this will have to do until my husband comes back from Normandy, but don't worry, we'll make do, everything for the war effort.

What a fucking cheap moron.