Saturday, April 19, 2014

I'm done being 'Mr. Nice Guy'

For the last 3 years, I have been renting a room from a guy who owns a rather nice house.  However, as time went on, things that I had considered a minor inconvenience at the time started becoming problematic.

Right now as I write this blog, I am sitting in a room I rent with no power.  No, there isn't a power outage in my area (although that too has been a reoccurring issue beyond my control), but only two rooms in the house are affected by this, mine being one of the rooms.

This is due to a problematic circuit breaker, which has been an ongoing issue now for the last 6 months.  The issue started happening more and more frequently especially whenever my roommate was home.  I'm guessing between me and my roommate, the circuit breaker cannot handle it.  Now that isn't to say that both of us are running every single electric device we have at full blast at the same time.  The only device in my room that uses the most electricity is a single computer that's normally left on 24/7.  Everything else we have is plugged in but not turned on, so the power draw should be minimal.  Regardless, this is an issue the homeowner has been aware of for a long time.  A week ago, he had notified me that he was going to be going on vacation on Easter weekend, and that before that he would install a new circuit breaker to prevent this from happening.   Well turns out he didn’t and sure enough, the circuit breaker popped… AGAIN! 

Now this wouldn’t be such a huge issue because normally you could just go to the breaker and flip the switch; but the issue is the circuit breaker is in the garage which is locked, and nobody except for the homeowner has access to it.  So if he's not available, we get screwed over.

I had asked him before if it wouldn't be too much trouble to leave a copy of the garage key should this happen and he's not around, and he literally flipped his shit and got pissed off that I should even ask such a thing.  He says he's got a bunch of expensive tools and equipment in there and he doesn't want to risk anything getting stolen…  Now this is a bullshit excuse because the same could be said for us (also having expensive equipment) and our rooms don't have a lock & key.  Needless to say, my Easter weekend is pretty much ruined.  I had shit I needed to get done and now I can't do it. Since I pay my rent in advance month to month I think what I’ll do is for next month’s rent I’m going to take $150 off the check.  I know as a renter I have rights, and why the fuck should I pay the full amount when I’m the one left sitting in the dark?