Day 122 - tenant responsibility

Today is the 3rd day of the 18th week, the 2nd day of the 5th month, the 122nd day of 2023, and:

• Baby Day but why today of all the all the days of the year?
• Birth Anniversary of the Third Druk Gyalpo - the third king of Bhutan who is credited with being the father of the modern country 
• Brothers and Sisters Day
• Childhood Depression Awareness Day
• International Harry Potter Day - commemorates the day the Battle of Hogwarts was fought in 1998 that ended in the defeat of Lord Voldermort as portrayed in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' by JK Rowling.  Despite her controversial social views, the world of imagination she created is eminently readable and fascinating.   
• International Scurvy Awareness Day
• Live Insurance Day
• National Concert Day
• National Fire Day
• National Life Insurance Day
• National Play Your Ukulele Day
• National Truffle Day
• Poem on Your Pillow Day
• Roberts Rule of Order Day
• Take a Baby to Lunch Day
• US Capital Police Day
• World Asthma Day
• World Tuna Day

Quote of the day:

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."

~ Timothy Leary, American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy and use of psychedelic drugs

There are two things any casual reader perusing my babbling has probably figured out about me:  

I am a life-long renter

I dislike housework and have become quite adroit at either avoiding it or procrastinating about it.

Because I grew up in a rental property, a duplex in east Baltimore County, and have rented most of my adult life [exception being the 10 years my ex and I had a home in Woodlawn], I always consider where I live to be MY home, just as much as if I had bought it.  A.  s such, I am a long-term tenant who has only moved a few times.  Lived in Victory Villa for 21 years.  Lived in Randallstown for 22 years.  Am living in White Oak for the past 16 years and counting.  I have seen management companies and owners come and go, shifting policies and perks.  I have seen properties deteriorate, and seldom do they spring back again.  I haven't gotten to know my neighbors who seem to change all the time as well as I have gotten to know the maintenance and housekeeping staff.  And I have noted when the neighbors just seem to stop caring about the property, especially when trash gets left around.

One of the interesting features of where I live now is the trash chute.  No longer do we have to take the trash out to the dumpster, I can walk down the hall, go to a tiny room, and open a little door and just let the garbage and trash disappear!  There aren't any containers in the little room for recycling, so that still has to be taken downstairs - which has always been a point of contention with larger items.  For me this has been a huge convenience, but of late it has been getting abused.  Residents are stuffing bags full of garbage that will not fit thru the chute door, so they leave them in the room.  Soon it becomes impossible to reach the chute door and so more people [including me] just leave their bags in the room.  The poor housekeeping staff roll around a huge bin to collect all of this and take it down to the compactor every morning, tying up one of our for elevators for a couple of hours sometimes to get this done.  

PEPCO has been causing some issue with power in my building.  Yesterday we didn't have water [when you live on the 20th floor, them thair pumps need to work so you can flush your potty]  for over eight hours and all four elevators were  out for  four hours.  (( side note:  There used to be some sort of emergency power system that kept at least one elevator working for emergencies in case of outages, but that apparently was not working either )).   When I got up this morning, and went to throw out the garbage, there was no way to reach the chute as huge bags were spilling out into the hallway.  I checked, and the elevators were out again, and I stood there for a moment wondering how in the world this would get cleared up, then added my little bag to the pile and walked away

I walked away.

And started thinking about that choice.  What was my responsibility as a tenant?  cleaning the common area was management's problem.  What was my responsibility as a good tenant, knowing that housekeeping was not able to get that huge bin upstairs?  

Now I hate cleaning up - the real problem with housework is that once it is done you have to do it all over again!   And I really hate cleaning up after people when I don't even know what is in those bags - some of them not even closed and some of the pretty smelly.  But my decision to let it be someone else's problem bothered me.  I walked past the pile-up twice, walking down to check the elevator to see if it was working yet about every hour.  The third time I took my phone with me - if the elevator was still not working, I was going to take a snapshot, then come back, find gloves, and see if I could sort thru the trash and start putting it down the chute.  This was not just management's or housekeeping's problem, it was mine because this is my home and I had contributed to making the problem worse.

The bags were gone.  The boxes were gone.  The little room smelled horrible and there was gunk on the floor, but one could reach the chute door now.   

I just stood there and was thoroughly ashamed of myself.  This is my home, and I had not taken care of my living space.  Did some other tenant on the floor roll up their sleeves and take care of the problem?  Did one of the housekeeping staff toil up 20 floors of steps and fix it?  I'll never know.  In either scenario, someone went above and beyond to make life more pleasant for all the tenants.  All I can do is offer silent thanks and quietly resolve stop thinking "not my problem" and walking away again when I see something like that developing