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I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, but my resident United States Postal Service worker is starting to slip. In just the last year alone, his performance has become irregular, sloppy, and downright unreliable at times. For a while, I truly thought that I had the best USPS guy in the greater Orlando area serving my apartment complex. He was always upbeat, friendly, and the mail arrived promptly at three o’clock every business day.
Beyond his regular quality service, he also proved that he was willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. I once had a very important package overnighted to me and it was vital that I be present at my apartment the following day in order to receive it. I took the day off of work so that I would be available to sign the confirmation when it was delivered, but in a quick change of circumstances, I ended up having to go into the office and was pulled away from my post. I spent the entire day worrying that if I wasn’t home when the postal worker came by, then the delivery of the package might be delayed by a few days. Rushing home on my lunch break just after three o’clock, my concerns were realized as the package was nowhere in sight. At the time, I was living on a second floor apartment, and because there wasn’t a box sitting snugly against my door frame and a visit to the leasing office proved fruitless, I became frustrated that I had missed the delivery. I went back to work in a foul mood, passive-aggressively torturing my co-workers for the inconvenience that they had caused me.
Returning home that night, I stepped out on my balcony and was met with quite a surprise. Behind a chair, I found a plain brown box haphazardly placed in the corner, emblazoned with a large orange sticker that read “Red Hot Delivery!” I took a moment to ponder how the package had appeared there. The apartment stairs did not lead directly up onto the balcony so the only option was that my faithful USPS worker, determined to overcome any obstacle, be it rain, sleet, snow, or a second floor apartment in order to deliver the mail had likely tossed the box up onto the balcony from the ground floor. The glass vase that had been pulverized by the box during its flight trajectory and now laid in pieces across the balcony floor backed this theory. While I admired the tenacity of the mailman, I’m glad he didn’t overshoot and send the box sailing through the window. Later on, looking up from the ground floor I noticed that there hadn’t even been a straight shot up onto my balcony, so I assumed that in his free time, the mailman had also been practicing his hook shot.
Ever since that fateful day, his service has started slipping. I don’t know if he is feeling the pressures of an email-heavy society or if he’s just burnt out on his job, but the mail has been arriving late, letters either arrive weeks after they should have or are returned to the sender, and his package deliveries are leaving more and more to be desired.
Figure A - Actual Photo.
About six months after the Red Hot delivery, I was anticipating another important delivery en route to my doorstep. I wasn’t exactly sure when it would be arriving, but I figured he would leave the delivery with the apartment leasing office in the event that I wasn’t home. The day that the package came, I arrived at my apartment faced with an interesting sight: the box had indeed been delivered in my absence, but not left safely in the care of the leasing office as I had hoped. Instead, the box sat directly in front of my door, out in the open and available for anyone who happened to walk by to scoop up and make off with. Now in his defense, he had attempted to hide the box by covering it up with my doormat. Under different circumstances this may have been effective, however, the box delivered was twice the size of the doormat itself (Figure A). This isn’t the work of a hard working postal employee, but rather a man who has just stopped trying.
I’m not sure what was said to the mailman, or if he’s just going through a rough time in his life, but I hope that he pulls it together in order to provide the high quality of mail delivery that I had come to expect from him. In the meantime, I’ll be asking friends and family to pause on sending me any physical mail, and I’ll stop ordering anything via USPS that I might value since I now know that once it arrives it will be open game to all of the apartment residents. If that doesn’t work then I’ll just have to look into buying a really big doormat.
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Several weeks ago I was awakened by the worst noise imaginable. It wasn’t the vacuum cleaner, it wasn’t a police siren, and it wasn’t even the voice of Tyra Banks. It was the fire alarm in my apartment building.
Now this wasn’t some small time smoke alarm, this was the building-wide siren that gets triggered when someone drops an atomic bomb on the apartment complex or when Ryan Seacrest becomes the host of yet another television show. This was serious. It all started at four-thirty in the morning on a Saturday night. I had just drifted off after a long evening and then suddenly and without warning my brain was being pierced with a sonic assault that caused me more pain than any migraine I’ve ever experienced. I sat straight up in bed as quick as a bullet while simultaneously one of the cats turned itself inside out and ran straight into a wall, and the other shot upward and latched onto the popcorn ceiling.
I’m a rather cynical person, so through the noise I found myself questioning the authenticity of the emergency. In school when we had fire drills we were always taught to escape a potentially burning building in a quick and orderly fashion, however since I had been asleep just thirty seconds prior, I took more of a sluggish and confused approach to the evacuation. I swung my feet out of bed and sat for a moment while I rubbed my eyes. I wondered what might be on fire, I wondered if anyone was hurt., and most importantly I wondered if this was important enough for me to have to put on pants.
After wrestling with getting my trousers into place and locating a pair of sandals, I groggily stumbled out the door at the exact same time as the neighbor couple across the way. We exchanged puzzled looks and began to roam around the area to see if we could discover what all the fuss was about. Everything seemed in good shape. The tenants of the entire building were out of their homes in various states of disarray, yet nobody could identify what the emergency was. No one seemed to be injured, nothing had been damaged, and the mulch was definitely not on fire. After several minutes of walking around and being extremely annoyed by it all, my female neighbor decided to call the emergency hotline for the apartment and see if they had the answers we were seeking. After speaking with someone for several minutes and hanging up she informed the rest of us that she had to go through a call center in India. We knew right then that it was going to be a long night.
We sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes listening to the siren wail and generally wishing for death. Soon after, a fire truck arrived on the scene. They strolled around the building and determined that nothing was on fire. Then they informed the crowd that they could not turn off the alarm as only the apartment maintenance crew had access to where the it was housed. They promptly drove off leaving us once again to contend with the racket on our own. By this time we had amassed a small group of people and spent several minutes getting to know each other, checking each other’s ears to make sure they weren’t bleeding from the noise, and speculating on the cause of the alarm. Some folks thought that maybe it was a prank while others suggested that perhaps there had been a fire but had been put out. I suspected that the alarm was triggered to create a mixer for the residents.
Eventually the maintenance crew arrived and was faced with an angry mob dressed in their pajamas. Had a lynch mob actually formed, we would have been the most comfortable lynch mob ever. The apartment employees managed to get the alarm turned off and my feeling of anxiety that had persisted for the entire hour finally went away. Our bonding experience was over and the group dispersed. As I was walking through the door into my apartment, the neighbors said something warm and truly heartfelt to me regarding the bonding experience that we had shared… I just couldn’t hear it since I had gone deaf from the alarm.
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A few years ago while living in my second floor apartment I found myself in one of the most awkward predicaments of my life. On a Saturday afternoon I headed out the door to run some errands. The second I stepped outside onto the balcony I noticed that something was different. The building hadn’t been painted, the neighbors hadn’t moved out, and my balcony furniture was still there. Not being able to identify the change, I shrugged off the paranoia and decided to move on with my day. As I went to venture down the stairs I noticed exactly what had been adjusted. The wooden staircase leading up to my apartment had completely disappeared.
Now, it may sound crazy, but I found this to be a slight inconvenience. I did what anyone in the same situation would do. I went back inside my apartment, closed the door, waited ten seconds and then reopened it, hoping that I would find my stairs magically restored. As I re-emerged outside, filled with optimism, I was only disappointed. Where the staircase had once been, a big empty gap stared back at me, laughing hysterically. Personally, I didn’t think the situation was all that funny.
The only logical explanation was that I was the victim of some epic practical joke by my apartment complex. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense since I’d never seen anyone in the office display any signs of a sense of humor during past visits. This led me to consider whether or not I had been late on my rent. Perhaps this was a new passive-aggressive tactic used for money collection. While pacing the porch without a logical answer I became enraged at the property manager for not giving me some sort of prior notification that this would be happening so that I could plan my life accordingly. I was beyond frustrated. I was seeing red. I was absolutely livid. My mind began to race, and I formulated a plan for breaking my lease and fleeing to a rival apartment complex. I would slander their name across town and not return my Laundromat or mail keys on my way out.
Forcing myself to cool down and think logically, I began to weigh my options in order to decide how badly I needed to run my errands. I quickly thought up three approaches to getting down to the first floor. My first instinct was to call the fire department, but that only gave me visions of firefighters rescuing cats from trees. I refused to be the proverbial cat. I considered the possibility of jumping from the ledge and grabbing for the large tree several feet away thinking that I could then climb to the ground. Maybe it would be easier for me to tie the sheets of my bed together and repel down the side of the building. I knew that this wouldn’t work since I’m a guy and therefore only own one set of sheets. The ideas were good, but seeing as how they required some sort of physical prowess to execute, this only angered me more as I am completely lacking in that department.
I decided that a relaxing day in the apartment was going to be the best course of action. As I turned to go back inside, I noticed something sticking out from underneath my doormat. Upon closer investigation I found it to be a piece of paper, which I pulled out and unfolded only to find a memo addressed to me from the apartment complex. It was to inform me that on this particular date, my apartment stairs would be deconstructed due to rotting wood and for my safety they would be replaced within a six-hour period.
Based on the date printed on the corner of the stationary, the note had been hiding out beneath the doormat for roughly two weeks. I decided right then that when I eventually moved elsewhere I was obligated to return the mail key to make up for all the bad things I had thought about the complex. I did however keep the Laundromat key.
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As happens every so often around any type of apartment complex, hired landscaping crews will come along to trim the trees, plant new flowers, blow the leaves, spend most of their day on break smoking cigarettes, and eventually they will lay down new mulch. Last Monday was one of those every so often type days.
I came home from work and saw that all of the sickly looking brown mulch had been replaced with a noticeably brighter kind that contrasted brightly to the drab gray color of my apartment building. The smell of the fresh mulch lingered in the air and coated my nostrils with an aroma that smelled faintly of burnt hair and old Chinese food. Now, I’m no mulch expert, but I hoped that maybe they had switched brands to something a little more wood-based. The last time they re-mulched everything, I could have sworn it was made from broken shards of glass. I also hoped that it would rain soon to kill the smell.
The following day my girlfriend took a stroll out to the mailbox and came back with a wild look in her eyes and told me that in her travels she had come across a pile of mulch that was on fire. Being the good person that she is, she alerted the property manager immediately. Regardless of the fact that the property manager didn’t seem to know what to do about it (my first suggestions would have been water or a fire extinguisher), my girl had done her civic duty. Over the course of the next few days there was an epidemic of mulch fires happening all over the complex. Nothing too serious, but in passing you could occasionally spot plumes of smoke rising from the ground around the trees and bushes. Was the Florida sun setting our mulch on fire? Had small volcanoes, which had laid dormant for thousands of years, suddenly opened up? Did we have a mulch arsonist on the loose? These were questions that I could not come up with answers to. At least, none that people would take seriously.
When next it was my turn to get the mail I saw a sign posted on the community bulletin board, where residents usually advertise things for sale, lame apartment events, upcoming yard sales, and personal ads looking for mates in a quarter mile radius. The sign read:
ATTENTION!
(¡ATENCIÓN!)
For the safety of all residents, please do not throw cigarette butts in the mulch. We have had several fires this week. If you see a fire, please call the property manager immediately.
Suddenly I had my explanation for everything. Though it was anticlimactic, it was good to know that we weren’t sitting on a scaled down version of Mount St. Helens. As I prepared to head back toward my apartment it hit me that these fires were actually leaving the door open for something that could really bring the residential community together. I produced a pen from my pocket and went to work on the fire warning sign.
While walking away I passed another resident heading over to pick up their mail. I knew that they would also see the sign, but perhaps they would look at these fires in a different light. After some creative editing the sign now read:
ATTENTION!
(¡ATENCIÓN!)
For the safety of all residents, please do not throw cigarette butts in the mulch. We have had several fires this week. If you see a fire, please call the property manager so that we can organize a killer weenie roast. I’m thinking that if we play our cards right we could also get a drum circle going and Lord knows I haven’t participated in a raging drum circle since my college days. I would ask that we leave the hallucinogenics at home though. Last time we brought hallucinogenics to a drum circle, Alice ended up in a coma and that was a big buzz kill for everyone. Plus, Larry was on some bad shrooms and was never the same after the hospital trip.
PS – Bring stuff so that we can make Smores.
Man, they are soooo good, am I right?
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We all have traumatic moments in life that we would like to forget. While most have to do with a rough upbringing and others have to do with failed relationships, mine occurred last August when I got stuck on my first floor porch.
Now, please don’t make assumptions and please don’t judge. Getting stuck on ones porch takes talent, finesse, and precise timing. It all started when I stepped outside my apartment with a cold glass of water to enjoy the beautiful Florida daytime. This is where the trouble started. I grabbed the doorknob to go back in and was faced with a harsh reality: doorknobs are not supposed to turn three hundred sixty degrees. The doorknob was definitely broken, and I was definitely stuck outside.
As I sipped my water I became aware of my vicious bed-head and current attire, pajamas, which ruled out seeking help from any people. They were likely to think that I was homeless and looking for money. Since I live on the first floor of my apartment building I knew that climbing over the porch wall and walking around to the front door was the best option. However, I had made the mistake of thinking that going outside barefoot was a good idea and the flowerbeds surrounding my porch were full of fresh mulch, which now resembled a field full of razor blades. As I gently lowered myself down onto the miniature spears, tears came to my eyes but I persisted and made it to the front door. As fortune would have it, I made yet another oversight and realized that even though I had made it to the door, and freedom was just on the other side, the house keys were inside. Thankfully, I remembered that even if I did have the keys, my chain lock was still going to hold me at bay.
Defeated, I traversed the field of razors yet again and climbed back into my cell. Even though there were no keys to be found in my pajama pocket, there was a cell phone. I was able to locate the number for my apartment complex in the contacts list and gave them a dial. To my horror, they had recently closed for the day and thus I was transferred to the emergency service line where a young lady who barely spoke any English but was ready to help me out with my emergency needs. I had to explain to her that I was stuck on my porch. She had trouble understanding the concept and informed me that there was a fifty-dollar fee for getting locked out after business hours. I had to clarify that I hadn’t technically been locked out and it was the doors fault over my own. I told her that I was stuck on the porch in my pajamas with no shoes, no keys, and half a glass of water. She failed to see the humor in the situation and informed me that someone would be along in roughly forty-five minutes to let me in. I could deal with that. The temperature was slowly rising in the late afternoon sun and the water began to taunt me. I knew that even though I would soon be free, I had to ration.
Forty-five minutes went by with no rescue to speak of. I once again dialed the emergency service line. The same gal answered and didn’t show any sympathy towards my situation. She assured me that help was on the way. I assured her that I was going to eat my hand if no one arrived soon. Finally, four hours later when I had nearly lost all hope of salvation, the maintenance guy appeared to let me inside. He unlocked the door and had to pulverize the chain lock with a screwdriver. As I hobbled towards the door, my feet nearly bleeding from another trip through the razors, he put out a hand to stop me. He says, “I’m sorry Sir, our policy states that I can’t let you inside the apartment until I see your I.D.”
Crap. I think I left that in my other pajama pants.
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