Am I out of line to complain?

[HForrest]

I'm a college student, and I've been living in this apartment for about a year. Some background: I'm a complete slob (in a long and arduous process of reform), and my apartment looks like a pigsty. I clean it every once in a while, then let it degrade into absolute chaos before I'm forced to embark on another cleaning frenzy. I always tidy up if I'm expecting company, which as it turns out, is pretty infrequently.

In the apartment lease, there is a provision allowing for the entry of the property management company into the apartment with 24 hours notice. Obviously this is a reasonable clause for emergency maintenance or other unforeseen issues that require attention, and in signing the lease, I envisioned that 24 hours would be a minimum time frame.

Rewind to several months ago:

A notice is taped to my door, stating that the owner wants to have his property appraised, and that they will be entering my apartment between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM the next day. I was a little bit perturbed by this, but I assumed there was a good reason it was happening on such short notice-- maybe circumstantial scheduling difficulties, some deadline, or other issue that I was not aware of. So I didn't say anything, cleaned my apartment, and they came in the next day to walk around inside for a few minutes (at some point within that day-long window).

Then, a couple months back, the owner wanted to have the doors revarnished. So notices were posted on our doors in the same manner, but this time, we were given a week's notice. The fact that we were notified a week in advance led me to believe I was correct in my assessment of the previous entry; that it was some unforeseen schedule conflict with the property appraiser or a last-minute thing that was a one time deal (and something they would generally try to avoid).

Now, this evening, I came home after a long visit with relatives over the weekend. A notice is taped to my door, dated today, informing me that the owner will be entering my apartment sometime tomorrow, "Between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM". The reason? "Preventative maintenance on your kitchen and bathroom drains", also adding that "He will be in your apartment for no more than 15 minutes". Now I have to spend my evening cleaning and reducing my apartment to a non-embarrassing state,  when I have a huge essay to write and studying to do by tomorrow.

Is it just me, or is that really bad form? I mean come the *expletive removed* on, is it that hard to let me know one week in advance that you're going to come inside my home, to do something as non-pressing and random as "preventative drain maintenance"? It seems totally inconsiderate and out of line, and I'm thinking about calling up the property management company to complain tomorrow. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but this is the second time it has happened, and the nonchalant way they go about it really irks me.

I'm a private person and IMO it's kind of a big deal when random people come into my home. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect that you could plan something like random unneeded drain maintenance at least a week ahead, and give people a little bit more notice than the absolute bare minimum you can get away with.

[wmenorr67]

Don't like it buy your own home.  That is the nature of apartment living.

[HForrest]

The whole "People entering randomly with only 24 hours notice multiple times yearly, for entirely non-urgent reasons" thing doesn't reflect the feedback I've gotten from others on their experience in apartments. Really? A longer notice is too much to ask?

If I don't have a certain degree of privacy, then why am I paying the ridiculous price for this fairly mediocre apartment in the first place? Why wouldn't I get a room in a shared house and save hundreds of dollars every month? There's no point to having an apartment if people are just going to walk through it all the time on a whim without any kind of reasonable notification beforehand.

[Scout26]

Point the One-ith: Pick-up after yourself and you won't have to go all cleaning crazy, when people will be coming in.

Point Two-ith:  You were gone for "A long weekend" to find a notice on your door.  It could have been there several days.  But you were gone.  Check with your neighbors, but my guess is more then 24 Hr notice was given.

Point Three-ith:  As someone who has replaced quite a bit of plumbing, drain maintenance is NOT "Unneeded".

Point Four-ith: If you don't like it, buy a house.

Sorry to be so harsh, but the truth is the truth.  

[HForrest]

Oh, I meant to put in my original post that the notification was dated today. And maybe "unneeded" is the wrong word. Seriously though, less than 24 hours notice? (I highly doubt they posted it on my door at 0800, based on past experience). Of course they can and will do it, and it's what I agreed to-- it's not like I'm going to raise huge stink about this. But I'm having real difficulty seeing how it's not entirely rude and inconsiderate on their part.

[HForrest]

I'm a college student...

Don't like it buy your own home.

If you don't like it, buy a house.

Gee, thanks for the advice, I had never thought of that before.

[BridgeRunner]

What Scout said.  My $.02:

It's random unneeded drain maintenance now.  If they didn't do it, it would become a drain emergency.  My downstairs neighbor's bathroom got flooded yesterday.  Apparently there was something funky in the drains, and right about when I started using my bathroom sink, he had Lake Gunk developing.

Today I got a call at work about the problem, along with the assurance that my place is ok.  Seems to me someone came in here to check that out.  Does that give me the willies just a bit?  Eh, a bit.  Is it a bit embarrassing?  Maybe.  Place isn't that bad right now, starting to get things put together (thanks in part to Scout, for that), but I did move in a couple weeks ago and still have Textile Mountain going on in the bedroom as I try to figure out where to put everything.  But hey, someone checked on my place, make sure that the plumbing issue wasn't destroying the boxes I have stacked in my bathroom.  This is what we call a feature.  They are not oppressing you.  They are fixing your drains.  That is bloody awesome.  

I moved into my apartment a couple weeks ago. In my neighborhood, property prices are extraordinarily depressed, even for these days.  A house was not out of reach.  I decided to go with the apartment for a bunch of reasons, one of which was the service.  As someone who has experienced the need to replace quite a bit of plumbing, and lacked the time, knowledge, skill, and cash to go about replacing it, I'd happy to have someone handle that stuff for me.  

And if you're thinking "Well, that's you, I'm not like that," hey, guess what?  Neither am I, or at least I wasn't until I decided to be.  There are pros and cons to someone having relatively free access to your home.  It appears that the positives outweigh the negatives, or you wouldn't still be living there.  Focus on the positives.  Like how your drains won't back up next month, and how you won't be saddled with an upside-down mortgage when you graduate and get a job offer three states away.

I sympathize with the slob issue.  I'm a slob in recovery.  It's a hard set of habits to break, and it feels like a losing battle most of the time.  But then, I have a couple excuses you seem to be lacking: their names are Ellie and Gabbie.  But it doesn't really sound like you're quite in the recovery phase yet.  If your place is always a mess, it's continuously devolving into worse mess, until you devote serious time and effort to cleaning, then you're not really addressing the problem.  You're hoping if you try harder it won't keep happening.  And that won't work.  Pick an area of neatness to develop each week.  This is a pot/kettle situation here, btw, because most of mine are gone and have to be redeveloped, but not all, and it'll go faster this time time around.  

Examples:

The kitchen sink:  Ugh.  It used to be gross.  I stopped storing the dishsoap bottle next to sink, found a spot for it and kept it there.  One less thing to create funky, drippy messes.  Got a little wire hanging basket for a dish-sponge.  No more sitting on the counter getting moldy and gross if it isn't washed and wrung out well.  And I got a whole bunch of cheap dishtowels and wipe my sink out ridiculously frequently.  

Bathroom clutter:  Go to Wal-Mart.  Get little wire or plastic basket of some kind.  Put daily use toiletries in it.  Put infrequently used items in a plastic shoebox or three.  Everything is contained and can be put away much more easily and neatly than by battling with a series of cabinets and drawers and shelves that used to have stuff spilling over and making messes all over the place.  

Horizontal surfaces:  NOTHING lives on them.  Coffee pot?  Goes in the cupboard.  Knife block?  Behind a door.  Slobs have a hard time figuring out what they're working towards.  I like to keep the goal simple. My bedroom is clean when there is nothing but furnishings sitting on top of any horizontal surface.  Ok, so sometimes a candle or a flower or something, but that's it.  If you have to put away or throw away every single thing on floors, tables, dressers, counters, etc.; you'll end up with less extra stuff and you'll have a place where everything belongs.  And you avoid stuff like what I have going on on my microwave right now--I stuck a stack of paper plates there.  Which were a magnet for the handful of straws.  then there was a bunch of paperwork from ATT, five or six bits of toys...you get the idea.  That happened because I don't yet have a place for everything.  But I will pretty soon.  I spent too many years shuffling stuff around, the perma-clutter than just sort of floats around the house.  Now I try to make sure everything belongs somewhere, not just shuffled from the table to the counter to the desk.  

Now, if you have a solution for car grossness, please share.

But things like the above are concrete steps.  And they aren't arduous.  If you do one at a time, and tweak it until it works, it's more than not arduous; it's delightful, because that's one less struggle in your daily life contributing to further chaos.  It takes a little time--way less time than you probably waste navigating the chaos--am there, am doing that, cannot freaking wait until I get my life put back together again, because living like this again sucks--and it takes some thought.  That's about it.  

Also, keep in mind that no, really, they don't bother to give you a week's notice, because it's just not important.  Most people don't need more than a whole day to prepare for someone to enter their home.  Twenty-four hours is perfectly reasonable.  Three days--which you may have had--is generous.  But, so, you do.  Well, first of all, that's your problem, not theirs.  Second, they're not your mom.  It's none of their business if you're messy and they're pretty unlikely to care, unless it's to the point where it's damaging the premises.  You are paying them to do maintenance on your home.  Stop caring what they think of you.  They probably don't, and if they do, so what?  They work for you.  Don't let your self-consciousness impede your perception of reality.  

And start having people over.  Great motivator for continuing to make progress.

[BridgeRunner]

But I'm having real difficulty seeing how it's not entirely rude and inconsiderate on their part.

Well, you have a problem with your personal habits.  They're failing to plan around your problem.  How is this rude and inconsiderate? 

[230RN]

Empathy

[HForrest]

A stranger being in my home at 8:00 in the morning means I need to be awake, up and dressed at a certain time-- That is an impedance to my lifestyle that requires adjustment and advance notice. This is 2011 and lots of people work and attend school at very different hours. On my sleep schedule, this is more akin to someone coming over at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.

How am I suggesting that others should plan around my problems? I deserve more than a few hours of notice to completely adjust my plans around their need to immediately come service my drains. Why should have to totally adjust my plans around their problem? I pay a considerable amount of money to live here.

[wmenorr67]

Hey if they don't fix "their" problem then it is "your" problem.

[HForrest]

If it were actually a "problem". Which it's not. It's preventative maintenance. That's great and all, just give me more than a few hours. And let's not forget the background of them doing this same exact thing to me, for a property appraisal. Wouldn't you want to know at least a few days in advance if someone was going to enter your home during the hours you normally sleep?

[red headed stranger]

I don't think it is odd to have a little bit of the willies about someone coming into you living space with short notice. 

However, if they are following the rules in your lease, it just goes with the territory of being a renter. 

[wmenorr67]

If it were actually a "problem". Which it's not. It's preventative maintenance. That's great and all, just give me more than a few hours. And let's not forget the background of them doing this same exact thing to me, for a property appraisal. Do you like having strangers in your house? What about during hours you would normally be sleeping?

A) What are you "normal" hours of sleep?
B) Have you went and talked to the management team and tell them as such.  Say something along the lines of, "Hey you left this notice on my door, do you have an approx. time that they might be at my apartment.  If possible can they come to my apartment at y time because I am normally sleeping at these time a-b because of my schedule."  If not unreasonable most will work with you.
C) That is why I have a house and not an apartment.

[HForrest]

I agree it goes with the territory-- I certainly agreed to it in the lease. This is not a very big deal. However, I am debating that by any good measure of common decency/courtesy, a responsible property management company would provide at least a few days notice to enter your home for a non-pressing issue such as a property appraisal or 15 minutes of drain cleaning.

Considering that not everybody works/studies 9-5 anymore, this should be common sense consideration. It is disrespectful towards my schedule and my use of the apartment (that I pay good money for), to unpredictably declare that you are entering my home within 24 hours on whatever whim, particularly because it's likely they were aware of these scheduled events well in advance. And considering that most people get back home from work/school in the evening, as I did today, it effectively lowers the notice period to more like 12 hours.

[BridgeRunner]

A stranger being in my home at 8:00 in the morning means I need to be awake, up and dressed at a certain time--

Why?  Seems it requires you refrain from wandering around nekkid that particular morning.  It is acceptable to wear sweatpants and a t-shirt when you are expecting maintenance dude to show up sometime in the next eight hours. 

That is an impedance to my lifestyle that requires adjustment and advance notice.

Because you are embarrassed, which you don't need to be, by your housekeeping, which you state needs to be improved upon. 

This is 2011

So?

and lots of people work and attend school at very different hours.

So?  You can be there.  You can be not there.  You can be in pj's or sweats.  You can ignore the maintenance dudes.  You can chat 'em up, if that's what floats your boat.  You can hang your head and apologize for the state of the place.  You can pretend you didn't notice the post-hurricane state.  You can clean up.  You can not bother to clean up. 

Sounds like it's an impedance to your "lifestyle" in that you know you're a slob, you want to be not a slob, you aren't there yet, and you want to make your consternation over the consequences of the slob "lifestyle" seem like someone else's fault.  That's ok, we all do that.  It's a handy trick for letting ourselves get away with stuff.  I do it all the time.  Ok, well not all the time, but probably more of the time than I should.  But it's nothing more than a mental trick.  They're not actually going to plan maintenance schedules around it.  Ever.  And that's perfectly reasonable of them.

Trust me on this.  I have a lot of experience in being a slob.

I deserve

Ok, this is where my empathy up and died.  Why exactly do you "deserve" to have your messiness be accommodated by the various maintenance personnel in your apartment complex?  In a world where vast, moving walls of water suddenly kill tens of thousand of people; where parents bury their children; where promising lives are routinely destroyed by mental or physical illness; where a very substantial proportion of people don't know what it feels like to not be hungry; where rivers of lava and boiling mud bury cities; where entire peoples are shredded to bits for generation or forever by genocidal lunatics; where fresh-faced kids go off to war and come back to face a life of physical, mental, and neurological challenges, like not longer having significant portions of their bodies or brains; where kids have slept every night of their lives bomb shelters, because they've been bombed every night of their lives; in this world full of more kinds of abject, crushing misery and despair than any one person can possibly comprehend, you DESERVE more notice than you contracted for because you and your failure to stop being messy are Just. That. Special? 

Sorry, I don't think so.  Nah, this ain't about you, it's nothing personal.  I just have a problem with the entire concept and culture of people demanding things they purportedly deserve for no particular reason other than they want something and can't come up with a more legit way of convincing themselves they ought to have it than that silly, ridiculous little word. 

I like nice stuff.  I like unlimited privacy.  I like it when things follow my schedule.  And if important enough to me, I'll do what I can to make those things happen.  But not because I deserve it.

Shakespeare said it best: "Treat every man according to his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?"

Ok, now that that particular rant is out of the way,

more than a few hours

By "a few" of course, you mean more than the 24 specified in your lease?

to completely adjust my plans

Yes, you might have to either adjust your plans to have a wild bacchanal that afternoon.  That would probably be unsuitable for the drain-maintenance visit.  You might have to put on some boxers, maybe even a t-shirt to wander out of bedroom.  And you might even have to pick up your laptop and take the afternoon's porn session into the bedroom.  That's about all I can think of without getting *really* creative, and no one wants that. 

their need to immediately come service my drains.

Ah, you mean them providing a service to you to ensure you aren't inconvenienced by sewage seeping in whatever clothing you've left on the bathroom floor?  Again, you've lost me here.  Last winter I cleaned my kitchen sink about three times a day to minimize the grossness in my kids and I using the kitchen sink to brush our teeth and fix hair and such because my bathroom sink drain was plugged up beyond my capability to repair, and I couldn't afford a plumber.  My landlord was in no hurry to fix the problem, either.  Have you experienced the joy of the place you live starting to kind of fall apart at the seams from neglect, and you were powerless to do much about it?  I'm guessing not so much.  In my world, when people show up to do stuff for me, what I say is usually "Thank you".  Even if it could have been done at a more convenient time.  But then I'm not convinced I'm special enough to "deserve" much extra consideration of my specialness. 

Why should have to totally adjust my plans around their problem?

They don't have a problem.  They have a building they are maintaining--apparently despite your efforts to trash it--in good repair.  That kind of management is a luxury.  Enjoy it.

A friend of mine works awfully hard to pay her rent.  I dunno if what she pays qualifies in your book as "a considerable sum" but it's a substantial portion of what she earns.  A couple years ago a police officer was shot and killed in her hallway, immediately outside her door.  By interesting confluence of events, it was the same officer who responded to the call when her sister was mugged the summer before.  In the aftermath of the shooting, her door was broken down.  Not sure exactly how or why, not important.  The hallway carpet still has the stains from the officer's blood and brains where they were spattered all over the entry to her home.  More than two years ago.  She used a padlock to lock her door until a few weeks ago when they got around to sorta' kinda' not really fixing her door.  She can't fight 'em legally because she already misses too much work showing up in court to respond to her ex's attempt to reduce the amount of child support he owes and mostly does not pay, and court schedules are not particularly amenable to rearranging things to suit the fact that a single mom has to pay day care fees every day, whether she is able to work or not, and whether or not she has a secure place for her child to sleep. 

So I think what I'm getting at here is this: Suck it up.  Life's a bitch.  If this is a serious problem in your life, then dear god in heaven, I want your life. 

I pay a considerable amount of money to live here.

Good for you.  That's probably why they perform proper maintenance, in accordance with the terms of your lease.  As that bothers you so much, there are alternatives other than buying a house.  You could move to my friend's complex; I promise you, no one will ever, ever see your mess because they don't do maintenance.  Ever.  Or you could move a couple miles south of my friend's complex and find an abandoned house to squat in; plenty of Detroiters live that way, but the crack dealers and gang-bangers might be even more irritating than the drain maintenance dude forcing you to face up to your messiness.  I know a couple of guys who've lived in homeless shelters for a while because life had taken a turn for the suck in various ways.  You can usually find one of those around.  Many include mandatory preaching/prayer, though, which also might be more annoying than the dude maintaining your drains .


I'm almost done.  Let me just restate here that more than one member of this board can attest that I'm not a neat person.  I try really, really hard, and I've particularly worked at it over the past couple of years, and I'm improving, but my home is far from a model of tidiness.  And I've been in your position and I've found it frustrating, irritating, sometimes overwhelming (because for some of us, our 2011 "lifestyle" involves chronic drug-induced insomnia in between 11-12 hour days at work in between raising a couple kids mostly alone on not nearly enough money, and just about anything can throw a serious kink in those precarious works).  And I've let that be a guide to me to keep working on keeping my home in a  decent state and to learn to sometimes let go and recognize that as long as I'm a slob, some people are gonna find out about it, and that's ok.  I can get over being a little embarrassed, because the state of my apartment is just not that important. 

[wmenorr67]

You know all I have left to say is suck it up buttercup.  Life sometimes isn't fair.  

You want to bitch and complain about a minor inconvenience in your life.

There are plenty of people in this world that will trade places with you in a minute.

[HForrest]

Wow, some fun y'all are. Forget I said anything.

[wmenorr67]

It was fun for us.

[wmenorr67]

Wow, some fun y'all are. Forget I said anything.

You know you come on here and ask a question.  You aren't happy because you didn't get the answer you wanted to hear.  If you don't want to hear the answer, don't ask the question.

[MicroBalrog]

in this world full of more kinds of abject, crushing misery and despair than any one person can possibly comprehend, you DESERVE more notice than you contracted for because you and your failure to stop being messy are Just. That. Special? 

Yeah, since horrid things happen somewhere in the world, we can be total impolite a-holes to other people...

Wait! I forgot, this isn't actually the case.

I treated this simply with my landlord. In my lease, it had set out that I will keep the common areas (kitchen, guest room, toilets) clean year round, and the bed room will be clean when I return it to him. If he wanted to show people the room he called ahead.

[wmenorr67]

I don't see where anyone was being impolite.  He asked a question and when he didn't get the answer he wanted to hear cried about it.

If he is asking for someone to feel sorry for his plight without trying to fix it himself, this is the last place he should come looking.  You of all people Micro should know that.

Oh yeah, Micro, also calling people aholes on this board isn't acceptable behavior either.  You should also know that.

[HForrest]

Sounds like it's an impedance to your "lifestyle" in that you know you're a slob, you want to be not a slob, you aren't there yet, and you want to make your consternation over the consequences of the slob "lifestyle" seem like someone else's fault.

It's an impedance to my lifestyle, because I have to get up, at 8:00 AM. And I was only informed of it 12 hours prior to that.

When I devote a large amount of my resources to having a private living space, I think a little bit more than 12 hours notice before someone I don't enters my house, is a reasonable expectation. Apparently, this is a notion that nobody else here shares.

Bridgerunner, you are reading way too much into a very simple post and a very simple point I was trying to make. That is probably my fault for making it too wordy and rambling on about my issues with neatness. Forget about my messiness- clearly the problems that result from that are my fault. You are focusing only on how this relates with my messy habits- that is something I threw in there only as an example of how I am displeased about this sudden apartment entry. I never blamed the property management company for anything relating to my apartment's demeanor. I blame them for failing to have basic consideration for my private living space and the money I pay for the sole purpose of having a private living space.

Suck it up.  Life's a bitch.  If this is a serious problem in your life, then dear god in heaven, I want your life. 

There are plenty of people in this world that will trade places with you in a minute.

I never said this was a "serious problem in my life". I never said I was going to write my congressmen. It is merely a minor gripe I was experiencing, and I thought I'd post it on this discussion board to get the perspectives of others, and to see if others have any valuable input or experiences related to the issue. Because like, that's something people do on this board: bring up little gripes or everyday issues they deal with. You people are reading way too much into what I posted.

[MicroBalrog]

I don't see where anyone was being impolite.

His landlord was.

Oh yeah, Micro, also calling people *expletive deleted*s on this board isn't acceptable behavior either.  You should also know that.

Only when HForrest's landlord starts posting here.

[wmenorr67]

Micro I owe you an apology.  I misread your post as an attack on BR not the OP.

I'm sorry.