I received a letter yesterday from a cousin who recently moved out of town. It really is amazing how some people's minds work.
A couple of months ago, we heard that this guy was planning a move. We hadn't actually heard from him in a while, so the family invited him to Christmas dinner.
He's not been close, and now he's even more distant. Not because he moved cross country, but because his own behavior led to a situation that left him figuring out how to blame me for his failure to retrieve his cleaning deposit.
On the day before he was scheduled to fly out of town for good, he asked if I would help him clean his apartment. My mistake was in assuming that it would be more or less empty. I've done moving. Cleaning is what happens last. In an empty unit. Usually.
I don't know what he was wasting time on besides packing belongings into boxes, but it didn't involve getting things ready to clean. Imagine my complete astonishment as I arrived to find that nothing had been done to clear the place out! The refrigerator was still full, and filthy. He hadn't even started emptying closets or cupboards. Bags of trash and other items were strewn around on the floor and kitchen counters.
I started on the bathroom. He hadn't emptied the medicine cabinet or cupboards, so I did that before moving on to the hard work. He is the soap-scum king! The tub and sink was vile with it, but I finally got that room to where it would pass muster.
After that was done, I helped him weigh, tape and label boxes, which would be sent to his new residence. Since it was raining, and since he sold his convertible, and since I only have a motorcycle, I called my dad to ask if he was free to make a post office run. PS: bring the cart.
He was, and we did. Filled the Camry with boxes. When we got back, there were more to be packed, and loads of other stuff he decided to abandon. I threw some of the trash bags in the dumpster, emptied out the fridge, filled more trash bags, and suggested he postpone his flight, because this place was in no way ready for inspection.
I told him several times that he was not going to get his deposit back. He said he was going to "keep working," and paid me for my time.
My parents volunteer for a local community crisis clinic, and there were plenty of men's clothes in the closet, as well as kitchen and home items needy people can always use. He arranged for his neighbor to hold on to the key, so my mom could come over and get the things he'd left behind.
The next day, I received no less than 3 phone calls from him, calling from the airport and obsessing about "5 boxes" that needed to go to the Post Office. "Stop and get tape. You might run out of tape."
I said, "I have plenty of tape, don't worry about it." He has a tendency to get obsessive about things, which is probably why he couldn't get his ass in gear to clean his apartment.
I met my mom at the place and got the key from the neighbor. Rather than the five boxes he kept mentioning, it was 13. Thirteen boxes, most of which needed taping and labels. Everything else was still on the floor; a gross of Xerox paper packages, framed artwork, boxes of old files, trash. He'd generously left cleaning supplies, hint, hint.
We totally filled the Camry with his boxes and took them to the Post Office. Without the cart, it was quite a task. I had to carry each box out, put it in the car. Then we drove to the Post Office, where I offloaded said boxes on the counter. By then, my mom was beat. At 85, she's not as up for marathon moving as she once was, so I turned the key over to the neighbor again. We'd sort through the discards the next day.
In the bedroom, everything had been pulled out of the closet and thrown on the floor. There was a big bag of clothing, ties and shoes, plus a mountain of coat hangers, and a big sack of vitamins (opened) with a note saying they needed a new home.
We sorted through all that, left the vitamins. Opened grooming products aren't really appropriate for crisis centers, either, so we left those. There were some kitchen items that would be useful to someone, we took those. He'd left a printer too, and a note asking us to take the framed artwork to "Auntie Helen's," a charity.
We were shocked to find he'd discarded a framed photo of our grandmother in Victorian wedding finery, and a picture of my aunt, taken by my uncle, which won a photography award years ago. I have to say, that lit my candle the most. The jerk didn't bother to offer these family photos as gifts, he left them with the rest of his detritus, for us to scavenge like some trash pickers at the Tijuana dump.
I finally lost my temper when one of the trash bags I was carrying out through the complex, across the parking lot to the dumpster, broke open, spilling paper clips, nails, and other office leavings strewn in the alley. By this time, mom was ready to leave. We had dropped his 13 boxes off, sorted through the useful junk, and loaded the car with his discards.
I dropped off the key with the neighbor, and we were in the wind away from that dreadful place.
And that was it, until I received a letter he'd obviously been obsessing over since he got a phone call from his former landlady.
Now, he's the victim here! The letter is about a page worth of ad hominem attacks on me, my character, my habits. It ends with an expected "Never write or talk to me again, I will throw your letters away." Expected? Why, yes. Because if I did respond, he would hear things that would blast his victim status out of the water.
He asked me to "help him clean" for one day. I did that. But he didn't uphold his part of the deal, as you can't clean around piles of crap, and he used rain as the excuse. "I couldn't get these boxes to the post office in the rain." That's because he had a ratty old convertible, and the boxes would get wet. Understood, and valid.
But why were the boxes not all packed, labeled, stacked and ready to go? Did the rain keep him from cleaning out his closets, emptying the refrigerator, throwing out all the unwanted trash?
Of course not! So exactly what the hell was he doing instead? Who knows? It's pretty clear that he planned to just snake out of town without dealing with the situation, leaving it in the hands of others who never agreed to spend two days cleaning his place for free!
The letter was fairly nasty, but I hang out on the Interwebs a lot, in forums that make his attempts at character assassination pretty weak. Hurt my feelings? You've got to be kidding!
But, here's the best part. I have apparently "lost a friend," according to him. A seldom-seen, opportunistic, money obsessed asshole is what I've lost, and as we say, "Nothing of value was lost."
The kicker was the invoice for $624.00 made out to me for his cleaning deposit refund, including a self addressed envelope! He is blaming me and my parents for his lack of ability to get his place cleaned! Never mind that my folks were doing him a favor by helping him with his boxes. Never mind that he left family history behind like so much trash. Never mind that the stuff he discarded will now go to people who can really use them.
I'm sure he thought he was being slick, leaving like that and somehow expecting us to clean up his mess. After all, if we had gone to the effort, he's all the way across the country, and I'm sure he'd balk if we billed him for two days of work. That might have been his cunning plan all along; throw up his hands, leave behind a huge mess, then fail to pay for the labor.
Except the labor might be a bit smarter than he gives us credit for. Yes, we did loot what he left behind, rugs, clothing, lamps, appliances, everything that people could use at the crisis agency.
And we took the family stuff. Presumably, he thinks the items he discarded would more than compensate us for our work. Yeah, except for one thing: MOST OF IT WENT TO CHARITY!
So the final amusing feature of this situation; the invoice demanding the return of his cleaning deposit from people who made no agreement to clean his apartment. It's our fault that he left tons of crap and made little or no effort himself to get this task completed.
He's probably still obsessing about it. Maybe he'll do something really stupid, like try to sue us for his deposit back. I would really enjoy that.
