dziga's blog post - Another first that includes slight discomfort...

Filing suit in small claims court. Never taken any legal action against anyone...I feel such things are done far too often simply to try to make a buck. I look at the legal system as a last line of defense to right wrongs, not something to be used for personal gain.

We recently purchased a house...something that I thought wouldn't happen for at least another five to ten years but things fell together perfectly...and moved out of our last apartment.

At various times in the past few years, money has not been flowing in at great rates. Some of my apartments have been found on the basis of what is the cheapest I can find. Can imagine that this has ended up with some "slum-lord" landlords. And it has...

Our last apartment was a step up, a much nicer place. But the treatment from our landlord was by far the worst we have had. She was incredibly disdainful towards us and all the other tenants. She was disorganized. She mistakenly told us over a month before we had to move out that we had to renew or move out in a matter of days and then hit us with new requirements for the lease. Whatever.

We have always gotten 90-100 percent of our security deposit back, she is trying to keep our entire security deposit. The basic problem...or the basis of her contention...is "smoke damage." Yes, we are both smokers (I know but we are alcoholics in recovery. It's almost expected of us) and rented the apartment as a smoking apartment and being open about our smoking.

So she is now trying to keep the entire security deposit, most of it for "smoke damage" by which she means a lingering odor of smoke. Renting an apartment as a smoking apartment and then trying to keep the entire security deposit because there is a smoke odor after the tenants move out? WTF???

I would probably just eat the whole thing in the normal course of events because that's often just the way I am. But her continual disdain, continual complaints about all her tenants, being very two faced in her interactions with us (she commended us on the state of the apartment during a walkthrough)...signs of something being very wrong and the security deposit thing makes it seem very likely that she does the same sort of thing with her other tenants.

Probably grandiose thinking, but a big part of my reasoning for going through with something of a nature that I generally refuse to go through with is to promote some sort of change. The landlord is a miserable woman. Getting her mortgages paid off and her bank account growing due to her tenants and basically hating them and what she does. That is a sad state of affairs.

One of the things that I try to do is to look at things that disturb me from an entirely different angle that frees me from a narrow perspective that I may get trapped into when looking at them. In this case, I am trying to look at her as trapped in her troubles. To have such horrible relations with people who are your customers that you can build relationships with. To grab an entire security deposit because one is so consumed with squeezing every penny that one can out of a transaction even if it, at the least, borders on unethical behavior. That is a sad way to live.

When does change start to occur? Usually when some sort of bottom is hit. How to protect her other tenants from similar things? Bottom. I'm sure that some of this is just rationalization on my part, but do believe that there are some very pure motives underneath it besides simply to right a wrong done to me.

Life is an adventure!