Lanlordly woes
I lived in a shared house in Mile End that was owned by this apparently respectable architect bloke. It wasn't too bad in general, aside from the bathroom and indeed the plumbing in general.

For a start, the boiler was a tiny one, designed (so we were told by the guy who came to fix it once) for a bedsit, not a four-bedroom town house. I'm really not exaggerating when I say that you had to run around in the shower to get wet -- it was like a slightly leaky tap. There was no bath.

If something ever went wrong, the landlord would either fix it himself (he fancied himself a handyman) or send around the dodgiest cowboy he could find -- the one who told us about the boiler also pointed out that its thermostat had been bypassed (with a bit of wire) because it was knackered, kept going off and the tight fucker wouldn't pay to replace it.

It all came to a head when the landlord decided the time had come to sell the place. But he couldn't sell it in the condition it was in -- in particular, the bathroom needed stripping out (it had been converted into a sauna -- no, really -- but was unusable as such) and replacing. So he decided to do it all himself.

So he stripped out all the wood panelling, leaving great gaping holes in the walls through which you could see daylight. To get in behind the radiators, he just took them off -- without switching off the water, thus flooding the kitchen and breaking the boiler once and for all (in the middle of winter). He then refused to pay to have it fixed.

He fucked up the plumbing on the new bath so badly that the water wouldn't even come out, but the shower was now completely broken so we ended up bathing by boiling water in pans on the stove and carrying it upstairs to the bath. The memory of kneeling in two inches of lukewarm water while ice-cold air blew in through the cracks in the walls still makes me shiver to this day.

We all moved out, but the bastard refused to repay our deposits because of some made-up damage he accused of doing (something like, breaking the frame of one of his pictures -- both untrue and also, not nearly enough damage to warrant such a penalty).

I can't think of a single person in the world that I genuinely hate, besides this guy. If I were ever to bump into him in the street, I'd kick him in the cobblers until he bled from the mouth.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 14:34, Reply)