Monday, March 3, 2008

The sitch on Sackett today

Well, a little update on the housing sitch...

To sum up, I pretty much lost my sense of humor about the boiler when I got the the front door today, hands full of laundry, and could not get out.

I don't know what the rest of you talked about with your parents when you were young, but I grew up with dinnertime stories about people who'd burned up in fires, people who'd passed out and died from carbon Monoxide poison, some who maybe never knew, some maimed and killed for no good reason. My good old dad described the bodies in detail, dead and alive, blisters over 90% of their bodies, searing on the insides of lungs, the children, the parents desperate to save them and the idiotic actions responsible for their deaths.

With a father who's a fire investigator, such talk is to be expected. And it sewed the seeds of my extreme malcontent today.

The boiler did its thing two more times over the next 24 hours last week, so the Tuesday was pretty much a re-run of Monday, with oily smoke and opening of windows and shivering in the resultant cold, sadly without the handsome fire fighters but happily without the pets in immediate danger, because by then Kristina had the sense to take the precautionary step of taking her dog to work with her and Jessica was home with hers.

Then there was the front door.. Oh, we've been telling the Management company about it for years - the knob falls off, sometimes you can't get in, sometimes it's like the Hotel California and you can't get out....and it's not like a house, where there might be other safe ways to exit the front of the building. It's the door or nothin', baby, unless you can get to the fire escape in the back.

Last week, certainly because it was 25 degrees out, we were locked out. The story goes that while the dubiously skilled fix-it guy was waiting outside in the cold for the (potentially actually skilled) boiler guy, he understandably got bored and tried to fix the door. And made it worse.

So for several days, we lived with it taped open, and watched the news for stories of killers in masks who come into unlocked buildings and half hoped the next person in would accidentally mess up the tape, which would increase the sense of security if we were on the inside, but eliminate our ability to get in if we were on the outside of the building.

Of course someone did eventually mess up the tape system, and I called my landlord from the stoop one day last week, shivering in the cold and unable to make the lock work.

"Buzz 1R," his response. "She's home and been letting people in." Yeah. That's a good permanent solution. Of course the lady in 1R, though extraordinarily nice, doesn't speak a lick of English. Jessica, Kristina and I set up a little phone tree and called each other to make sure someone was here who can let the others in before leaving to go anywhere.

Meanwhile, I programmed the numbers of two 24 hour locksmiths in my phone, just in case.

Why didn't I call?

THAT is exactly the question. At the heart of this very question, I believe, is the brilliant psychology that our landlord, Orazzio, has played upon us all. Whether he has strategized it, or come by it by accident or out of desperation, I don't know, but somehow all of us have clearly been played. Somehow no one in this building, to my knowledge, is currently seeking legal action against Peto Management.

How is that possible? After years of monthly letters stating the exact problems and no permanent fixes, how is it we are all still participants in this group notion that somehow, someday in the future, the water damage will be fixed, the buzzer will work, the doorknobs will stop falling off, the mailboxes will work, the stoop will be repaired, the windows will go up and down like they're supposed to (and we'll be able to see through them), we'll have safe heat, access to the back yard for the cable guy, and enough hot water for showers?

Have we all drunk the Cool Aid?

I think the landlord's secret is in giving us just enough action to keep our ears off the phones and feet out of the courtroom. He has an amazing intuition as to my tipping point. My feet will be on the pavement when he'll finally authorize a fix - at least a temporary one.

Or, like two weeks ago, he sent the dubiously skilled fix-it guy to my door after I'd called, in order to explain why things were not getting fixed. (Never mind this guy spent an hour talking to me when he could have been fixing something.) There aren't enough employees to manage the eight buildings he owns (because they haven't been paid and then they quit, even the illegal immigrants). People have fallen behind paying rent and there aren't enough funds. Orazzio owes the places where they get supplies and therefore they can't get new anything. On and on and on.

Soon it becomes a counseling session in which I deliver career advice to the guy who's telling me he can't pay his rent (to Orazzio) because he's not getting paid regularly (by Orazzio) and who dreams, positively dreams of becoming a sanitation worker for the City of New York. There's a wait list, he says, but he knows some guys who know some guys who're soon gonna retire early, so he maybe has an "in."

And I'm thinking, doesn't it sound like Peto Management needs to sell a building? Maybe I'm nuts. I know being a landlord is tough. Managing a rent-stabilized building has to be tougher.

But look, he could have saved himself that expensive ticket from the city by putting lids on the garbage cans years ago! What a concept! He could have saved himself that expensive repair to our bathroom if we could have reached him when it started to drip. (As usual, his answering machine was full, apparently with other people calling with complaints and employees and supply houses looking for money, so nobody came for days and by that time the ceiling had caved in.)

Yet somehow he manages to engage our sense of pity, our sense of well, that's good enough, our sense of hope. Through the voices of his pitiful employees, who appear sometimes and invoke our sense of sympathy that they are not the cause of the problem, only victims of it, as we are, we get stuck in a downward spiral of no-I-don't-have-time-to-deal-with-this and -well-it's -really-not-that-bad and people-in-third-world-countries-have-it-worse-so-what-am-I-
complaining-about mentality.

We take a little action, like calling the city, and someone comes out and inspects, or not, and then nothing happens (are they getting paid off?) So we're quiet.

But I think the law is on our side. Today I called the Department of Buildings and actually talked to real person - an inspector who says he's coming out tomorrow to look at the boiler.

Good luck getting in, I tell him, with the buzzers not working and- isn't it ironic- he needs to call the landlord to get access to the thing.