I suppose it’s a sort of milestone… People are posting advertisements in the comments on my old entries. I’ve been deleting them of course… Especially since they seem to be trying to sell either dental insurance or pornography. After all, it’s not like I’m making any money off of this thing, so it’s hardly fair that someone else uses it for advertising. I react badly when people do that sort of thing to me. Just ask some former neighbors of mine…
‘Way back in the days of yore, I lived the apartment life in Ann Arbor. One of the last places I lived was well away from central campus, and therefore cheaper than the usual student slum. Two friends and I were living in a very nicely sized building with six bedrooms upstairs. There was one room for each of us, one library, one computer room, and one guest room that we eventually rented to a fourth person. It had a smaller apartment in the front, and a second one in the back which our landlord used for storage. The only disadvantage was that it was located close to the stadium.
Traffic on football weekends in Ann Arbor is notoriously vile. It’s bad enough that avoiding it was one of the chief things that my Fiancee and I took into account in our calculations about what weekend we wanted to get married on. It had to be in the fall, before deer hunting season (some of my relatives are hunters) and on a weekend where there was no home game. Back in that apartment I didn’t think it would be that much of a problem. My main method of transportation was by bicycle. I didn’t even own a car.
And that actually became part of the problem.
Y’see, the building and it’s parking lot were designed with the expectation that eight people and a similar number of cars would be there. Instead there were four people and three cars. This left a huge amount of space that we could rent to passerby on football weekends. We never wanted to. But our neighbors did.
I should probably digress a little bit here and talk about the first time I met these guys. We’d all just moved in, and I’d just gotten back from somewhere (grocery shopping, I think) with my friend BadMovie. As we were driving up, we saw that there was a green ROTC van parked in our parking lot. Standing outside were a bunch of people in green fatigues with pillowcases over their heads. Standing there shouting at them was an older, similarly uniformed guy, without a pillowcase. If I recall correctly, he was screaming something about how the current target of his attention would need his pillowcase as either a security blanket or a diaper. I turned to Bad Movie and said, “Oh, I get it. It’s a hazing.” Unfortunately, I did this just as the drill-sergeant type person paused to inhale for the next burst of invective.
As it turned out, some of the pillowcase bedecked recruits were our new neighbors, and they had volunteered our parking lot as a secluded location for their little bit of ritual humiliation. We didn’t really see them very often after that, at least until the first football weekend.
That’s when they started renting out parking space in our driveway.
They seemed surprised when we told them to stop it. After all, we weren’t doing anything with the space, so it must be ok for them to rent it to other people, right? We told them that it was not, in fact, ok. And that if they did it again, we’d have the cars towed.
The next football weekend, we put up a sign indicating that the parking lot was for tenants only. They tore it down and started parking cars there again.
And we called to have them towed.
We’d called early enough that there was only one car that needed hauling away, and once they realized that we were serious about the whole thing, they managed to convince the tow truck driver to just move it over onto their property, after paying a hefty towing fee.
That night, our neighbors got good and drunk and threw all sorts of garbage against the side of our house. They did a decent chunk of damage to our screen door, and the porch was a mess. Fortunately, we’d planned ahead and had a video camera set up, taping the whole thing… The cops were very understanding, and we wound up with a new screen and a freshly painted porch, courtesy of our neighbors’ landlord and at our neighbors’ expense.