That's What She Said

By Kaitlin Mayhew

Moving into a first apartment should be an exciting time, full of paint colors and poster sales, not police reports and scary multiple door bell 9 am wake up calls. Alas, the last month of my life has been filled with the events most resembling the latter.
Despite the initial excitement my two roommates and I felt at finding and securing our first off campus living quarters, it seems as if signing the lease was the high point of the moving in process. Everything since went going downhill.
The first load of belongings was dropped off in July, which was also when we found out the apartment had not been cleaned. There was hair in the kitchen sink, thick layers of dust and dirt on the blinds, and the bathroom was nothing short of repulsive. We later found out that the last tenants were college boys. I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. Anyway, we called our ever unreliable hardly ever reachable absent minded property manager and asked if they could send a cleaning crew in to make the place livable. By some miracle she answered and assured us it would be done within the week. So, we dropped off our cargo and returned home.
Upon returning to our humble abode a few days later we were surprised to find all of our things left their previously gone. Yes, I was robbed after having an apartment for a week. Although the cleaning crew swears they threw it out, why any sane person would throw away an oriental rug, handmade table,  mugs, brand new blender, etc. is beyond me and frankly suspect. We eventually worked out a settlement with the maintenance company, however the check for the damages has yet to arrive, despite our property manager’s assurance that it should have arrived on three separate occasions.
As if that wasn’t traumatic enough for three first time tenants, the air conditioning unit broke the second day. Our ever-appeasing property manager assured us that someone would be there to fix it the next day. That was two weeks ago. He arrived yesterday.
I awoke with a start to the furious ringing of our doorbell. Fortunately our air conditioner miraculously began working about three days after we reported it broken, which was good for us, but made for an awkward conversation with the repairman.
In addition to these lovely happenings we also have a broken ceiling fan, three broken doors, one of which is the back door, and are bereft of a garbage disposal which we were assured would be included. If you’ve ever had to clean clumps of oatmeal out of a kitchen sink so it won’t clog the drain you understand why a disposal is necessary.
In any case my roommates and I have abandoned the idea that our apartment experience could ever be perfect and resolved to settle for unique. In the spirit of being different, as we were trolling the Internet in search of wall decoration, my roommate came upon an inflatable elk head mounting. I don’t know if anything like this has ever previously been encountered. Just to be clear, we are all very animal friendly in apartment C3 the head is made entirely of plastic. However at first glance is enough to deceive or at the very least startle. Bernie, as we have come to call it, is a good representation of our apartment as a whole I think, unique, a good conversation starter, potentially controversial and at the same time completely awesome.