Hickory Ridge Sucks
10.24.6
Last month, I finally moved out of my crappy apartment at Hickory Ridge. I had been living there since December 27th, 2003.
Jesus. It sounds like such a long time when I say it that way. During those 33 months, my life has taken quite a few twists and turns. That apartment watched as my relationship with my ex-fiancée slowly disintegrated. It knew me in the months that followed when I was poor and struggling, and it saw me rebuild my life from there into something better than it had ever been before. It witnessed the creation of this website, and all the crap that currently fills these pages.
I'm not the type of person who lets the memories of what happened somewhere affect me, though. Sure, it's interesting to look back now, but I certainly didn't leave for any kind of stupid emotional reasons. I left Hickory Ridge for one reason and one reason only.
Hickory Ridge sucks a giant dick.
It's funny...it used to be a fairly nice place (in a cheap rent kind of way, at least). Over the last three years, however, the complex itself disintegrated much like the relationship I had originally hoped to cultivate on its grounds.
Each year, it seemed like the management cared less and less about the quality of the area. They started renting apartments to more and more drug dealers, criminals, and stoned single-mothers. They stopped keeping the grounds clean. The landscaping went to complete shit.
This summer, our pool didn't even open until halfway through August, because the maintenance crew simply didn't feel like removing all of the beer bottles and thrown rocks that had collected inside over the winter. It seemed to me that they could have avoided this problem altogether by investing in any kind of pool cover. They were apparently content, however, to just punish all of the residents after the fact for the bad behavior of a bunch of bad seeds.
The apartments were also starting to fill up with giant families of illegal immigrants, which made parking a complete pain in the ass. The worst part about it was the noise that these families' children would create. I suddenly found myself longing for the old days. Those bastard children from years gone by had spent their days screaming, too...but at least there weren't three-fucking-dozen of them out there at any given time. I almost started to wish that Rando had never left. At least with him around, people had begun to keep their children indoors.
Things just kept getting progressively worse. More sirens. More gang fights in the parking lot. More crappy neighbors (The most recent couple being seemingly in the midst of a 3-month long domestic dispute). I dealt with all of it.
The last fucking straw, however, was when my brand new car started getting vandalized for no reason. These assholes weren't even stealing anything. Just breaking windows. I found out from a police officer, that windows get broken constantly in Hickory Ridge. I guess these scumbags just feel like bringing everything down to their level, so they can feel a little bit better about what worthless shitbags they are.
Anyway...the instant that started happening, I decided that it was time to move out. When buildings started burning down a week before I left, I knew I had made the right decision...
Moving out was not without its problems, of course.
A few weeks had passed, and I had not received my final bill in the mail (despite my having provided them a forwarding address). Eventually, I called their "accountant" and discovered that they had sent this move-out bill to the address I had just moved out of. She then told me that she would send a copy to my new address.
After that she proceeded to review my bill verbally. There was a water charge: $27.80. Ok. Gas: $34.00. Alright. One day's worth of rent, since I hadn't moved out until October 1st: $19.33? Bullshit.
"No, no, no," I argued, "I moved out on the 30th. That shouldn't be there."
"Oh, wait...I'm sorry," she said, suddenly backpedaling. "This is actually a balance forward on your water bill." She then went into great detail on the subject, explaining to me that water is billed 75-days back, and that one charge was for my final month there, and the other was for a previous month. Alright then...fine. At this point I was just happy that they hadn't tried to screw me on my cleaning charges.
When this last weekend began, I still hadn't received a bill in the mail. Considering the threats she had made about my account being sent to collections on the 25th, I decided to take matters into my own hands. So, I drove down to Hickory Ridge on Saturday morning to pick up a copy of the bill. Upon looking at it, I suddenly found myself very skeptical about her truthfulness.
It was right there in black and white. Water bills were clearly marked as such. In addition to that, the code given to water bills was CI UTIL, while this "mystery charge" had been given the code of CA RENT. On top of all this, my move out date was indeed erroneously listed as being October 1st.
As far as I was concerned, I had been lied to. The evidence in support of this theory seemed pretty clear-cut to me. An angry 2-page fax to the property manager later and they were removing the charge.
In the end, they never admitted to any wrongdoing. The property manager claimed that it actually was a water charge. She said that for some reason when water charges "build up" they are added into the rent. "We've been looking through your past water charges, though, and we think that you might have been double charged."
How convenient...
Whatever. I'm fucking done with Hickory Ridge, and I couldn't be happier.
This last month has been spent living with Autumn's mom. It's been entirely uncomfortable. That's not to say that her mom has been anything but nice and hospitable. It's just a cumbersome situation for someone like me.
Living out of suitcases. Never able to find a hand-towel. Light switches that don't do anything. The inability to leave my shoes just lying around. Forks and spoons with minor imperfections. The whole experience has been an obsessive-compulsive nightmare for me. I simply cannot wait to be in my own apartment again, where I can actually fix everything that offends my overly-sensitive particularities.
I don't have long to wait, either. I will pick up the keys to the new place at noon tomorrow. It's a great little apartment, in a nice neighborhood, and quite frankly...I really think I deserve it.
It's gonna be a whole new era.
