THE $2,000 COFEE MAKER
We sprayed a tenant’s suite for cockroaches, and it didn’t work. The tenant wrote a letter demanding we do it again, and if we didn’t, she would put her rent in escrow. She worked at a law office.
We sprayed again. Then we sprayed the whole building. About a thousand dollars’ worth of spray.
She still had bugs. So she called the city building department, which sent out its newest, most gung-ho inspector, who decided we needed to point the chimney and plane the boiler-room door in the basement, and fix up everything in between.
Then she complained again.
So we brought in our cockroach “bomber” guy, who zapped her apartment, including a direct hit on her coffee maker. A dozen cockroaches scampered out. She had gotten a used coffee maker from her boyfriend.
That roach-infested coffee maker set me back $2,000.
I planned not to renew her lease, but she told me she was not renewing her lease before I could tell her I was not renewing her lease.
That bugged me. Her boyfriend annoyed me too. As did her 20-pound bond, legal stationery. She wasn’t even a lawyer.
On move-out day, she and her boyfriend put the mattress and air conditioner on the treelawn. I had to move the items to the dumpster. Mattress moving is seriocomic wrestling; A/C pick up is clean and jerk. And I didn’t deduct anything from her deposit.
She was OK. Her only major negative: that she had dropped a dime (X 20,000) on me.
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Treelawn, two paragraphs above, is Cleveland talk for the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk. Odder: Akronites — Akron, Ohio, residents — call the treelawn the devil strip.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/9/09
6 comments
I told this story in Property class. Made for an interesting hypothetical when we studied Landlord-Tenant law. (Were the roaches a patent or latent defect … ?)
re: roaches
Teddy: Patent or latent? I just spent five minutes on the ‘Net and still don’t know what those terms mean exactly.
I can say this: There were no roaches in the apt. prior to move-in, and there haven’t been any since the tenant left.
The tenant never admitted the roaches were caused by the coffee maker. We couldn’t prove it either. However, the bug guy was pretty adamant the coffee maker was the cause.
And now on to drain flies . . .
Yup, we called it the “devil strip” in Barberton, too, when I was a kid growing up there in the 1950s to early 1960s. It made a kind of sense to me then: We owned our yard, the city owned the sidewalk and street — but who owned the devil strip? I didn’t literally believe that it belonged to the devil, but I thought of it as “no man’s land.” A logical enough place for a devil (as idiom) to dwell.
Good. A lawyer’s job is to confuse people professionally. This means I am well on my way to becoming successful in the field.
OMG, I did NOT know that devil strip wasn’t a worldwide-known term!
Thanks to Mr. Barberton for some possible explanation.
We did figure, for sure, that we owned that part of the property because my mom took care of that equally to the rest of the yard. And that meant super care. Well, it meant super work for us kids to do. Edging, weeding, u-name-it.
Ha, devil’s strip! Haven’t thought about that in so many years!!
Treelawn and devil strip are new ones to me. Very Midwestern. Here in Mississippi the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street is called the bankette (or maybe bancette – not sure about the spelling). Don’t ask me where the term comes from.
On the patent/latent debate regarding the roaches, they were latent while cozy in their coffeemaker home, but certainly patent after the coffeemaker was zapped by the bug man. I wonder what roach-flavored coffee tasted like.
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