Monday, September 11, 2006

Long story short (but no less drama)

My life has had a tendency towards being drama-free.  I like it this way. Life is simpler and easier to enjoy. However there’s been this ongoing saga involving renters these past few months.  Allow me to boil it down to some quick bullet points…

• We have to rent out the little guest house in the back in order to afford the monstrous mortgage payment.
• The first renter we had was perfect—quiet, always paid on time, and we hardly ever saw him.
• He left and we had to find a new one. We went with one who seemed nice enough.
• Before agreeing to rent to her, she affirmed that she would be the only resident. Her gang-tattooed boyfriend immediately moved in as soon as she settled in.
• She assured us that she was trying to quit smoking, and that she actually hated the smell of smoke in the house. Bullshit. The place smells like an ashtray now.
• The tattoo-covered (and when I say covered, I mean covered, head to toe!) boyfriend has no job, and constantly goes in and out all night long.
• What was supposed to be just one resident turned into four when her daughter and her girlfriend moved in.
• This month they skipped paying rent. We asked the 20-year-old daughter where her mom went, and she had no clue, and was worried because she hadn’t seen her in over a week. Her mom had told her that she’d been laid off from work.
• I called her boss and found out that there were no layoffs. She hadn’t even been fired. She just stopped showing up for work. She didn’t quit, didn’t contact any coworkers, just stopped showing up for no apparent reason and had been missing for nearly two weeks.
• The daughter ended up scraping some rent money together because she didn’t want to be kicked out.
• Mom finally shows up today, after we both had gone to work and after the daughter and girlfriend had left the house. She locked the daughter out of the house.
• We get called by the frantic daughter, who has no idea what to do. We rush back to the house and confront the two deadbeats and tell them we are evicting them. They are no longer welcome on our property.
• They thought that since the daughter had paid rent, everything was cool.
• We told them that the daughter and her girlfriend were welcome to stay and continue renting, but she and her scary boyfriend were to be out in three days.

I’m not used to this much drama. What is wrong with this woman? She is a compulsive liar and uses everyone. She constantly guilts her daughter, who is obviously more stable, into helping her out financially. She’s even manipulated her way into getting money out of her ex-husband. What a train wreck. I can’t wait to get this lady out of our lives!