This first tale has a happy ending. The second is an adventure in progress.

I met Barry down at the ’shmong Friday night, parking in the lot next door. When I returned to my van, a small postcard had been stuck in the driver’s side window. I went to pull it out (and discard of it responsibly, of course, not toss it on the ground), but it wouldn’t budge.

Someone had actually glued a promotional postcard to my window.

I managed to peel off the outside of the card, leaving white backing to a postcard promoting “Secret” at Parizade. I called Parizade’s number (which was on the card) and left a message, with my name and number (but never heard back). Today, leaving work early for reasons I’ll tell in my second tale, I decided to swing by and see if anyone was there.

The host at the door apologized and said that they just rent the space out to this Secret dude, and he was responsible for the vandalism to my vehicle. I was not happy with this explanation, needless to say. The host retrieved the Secret’s phone number and email, and an assistant manager, Sean, came to talk to me. Turns out I was only one of about 20 people who called to complain.

Sean came out with a glass of water, soaked the card and scraped it off. It took about 10 minutes, and we had a pleasant chat while he did so.

He could have shrugged and said “not my problem.” But he didn’t…he realized that although the guilty party in this was a Parizade partner, it was still their name and number on the card and their reputation on the line. In ten minutes I moved from “I will never dine here” to “I’m going to have to come back here for dinner some night.”

Thanks, Sean!

The reason I’d left my studio early is the same reason I’ve left at around 3:30 for weeks now. Because of the renovations going on in the building, my studio was moved from the 6th floor to the 3rd in August. Problem is, there are no blinds in the new space. I assumed that within a day or two of being alerted to this (and the dead outlet and the ungrounded outlet in the newly-finished “renovated” space), that the property manager would make sure that the blinds were moved to my new space. The elevator operator took it on himself to install blinds in one window, but I guess the others were already gone, or someone else had grabbed them.

I asked about it a few more times, and kept getting a “yeah, we’re working on it” sort of response. So the day the one working, grounded outlet in my main room went out, and I got another “yeah, we’ll get to it” response, I blew my top and demanded to speak directly with the landlords. The electricity was fixed the next day.

I’m still waiting on the second set of blinds. Problem is, not only does it make the monitor difficult (sometimes impossible) to see, it also makes it very HOT if I’m directly in the sunbeam. On cloudy days it’s not so bad. But on a sunny day it’s impossible to work as the sun falls directly on my right arm. One day I continued to work, and even after I stopped my arm was stinging like a sunburn for a half hour afterward. And as the sun hits that window around 3:30, I’ve simply been packing up my computer and working from home after that.

So when I left today, I decided to document the issue by picking up a pair of cheap thermometers at Walmart (I know, eww. I don’t usually shop there, but they seemed like the kind of place that would carry cheap thermometers. They did, $1 apiece.). And they had a bucket full of cheap, peel-and-stick blinds. For $4.88. Which took me about 5 minutes to cut to size and stick up. Which I’ll be taking off the rent, along with an amount commensurate with being unable to use my space after 3:30 in the afternoon.

But my question is: why couldn’t the landlords or property managers have done this themselves? Rather than just pushing the blame onto the construction crew, or the landlords? How friggin’ hard is it to put up a set of blinds? In order to keep a tenant…or two, or three?

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