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.