One of the apartments I lived in as a kid had started with the best kind of landlord: completely absent unless something needed to be fixed. But after a year or two, he sold it to essentially the opposite: Always there unless something needs fixing.

The actual owner was a retired guy who owned a bunch of apartments on the other side of town, and didn't want to be bothered with actually running this one building. He bought it so his weird son could move there and have a place to work on cars. So we now had a nosy neighbor that was always ready to tell us our business but wasn't going to be responsible for any actual upkeep, while the real landlord might as well have been in witness protection anytime we needed something. And as an added bonus, we had to move the car from the safe, spacious parking lot to the busy street in a fairly shitty neighborhood.

When I got my driver's license, a friend of the family sold me a really shitty car for $5. I got it home but needed to get it worked on because I've always believed that when it comes to steering and brakes, a car should be able to do at least one of those things reliably.

The next day, the bipedal rodent next door asked my mom about the car and she explained that it was mine and I was going to be getting it worked on so I could have a car. He offered $50 for it so he could fix it up and sell it, which my mom politely declined.

Later that day, my mom and discount Norman Bates got into an argument about some trivial bullshit and the by the next morning, my car got towed away. The shit head then went on to explain that the street in front of the apartment would be restricted to two hour parking, and that my mom would have to move her car if she didn't want it towed. He didn't care that there was nowhere else to park, not his problem.

So my mom showed up to work crying and on the edge of a nervous breakdown, which caught the attention of her boss, who just happened to be a member of the city council. She explained what had happened and he told her not to worry about it. Turns out the little unregistered business running out of our parking lot was about 7 different kinds of illegal, and while the place was being inspected by the city they also found several violations that would get very expensive if they weren't fixed.

In the aftermath of the legal colonoscopy, the lost heirs to the Habsburg dynasty were suddenly willing to be a lot more reasonable. We still had to park on the street (which was bullshit) but dipshit junior talked to his dad and the right to park there was going to be added to the lease agreement and they were both going to be off our backs for at least a few months because they were too busy dealing with the city.

Sadly, I never did get the gas guzzling death trap back. It would take a year and a half before I finally got my hands on an even more fucked up car.

More relevant to this post, there was a time when the plumbing backed up and the toilet started backing up into the bathtub. It's Saturday afternoon, my mom calls dipshit the elder (now actually answering the phone in the wake of the previous story) who says he'll come take a look at it on Wednesday or Thursday. My mom hangs up and calls a city renters hotline and asks what would happen if, hypothetically, someone were in this situation and complained to the city. Turns out, a lack of functioning plumbing is a pretty serious code violation and the fines could start after twenty four hours. When my mom called the old man back, suddenly he found the time in his schedule to come look at it the next day. And then when he couldn't fix it himself (shocked-kirk.jpg) he had a plumber there on Monday morning.