Heather Seggel’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Some people may be born to misandry, but I’ve always been happiest when I have some male energy in my life, my only rule being pants of all parties remaining on at all times. Guys are cat-like in their independence and long silences and more likely than the women I know (as opposed to Women in General) to obsessively quote from The Simpsons at any opportunity. I recall a dead-end gig from years back and a coworker who I was slowly getting to know; the day I said, “That’ll learn him to bust my tomater,” and he laughed, boom: Friends. So it took a little doing for me to want to pulp the whole lousy lot of them into manburger. And it happened because of handymen.
Here’s everything you need to know about mobile homes: They are compact, affordable housing and likely to play a bigger part in our collective future as the population ages and people have less to live on. The newer ones are well-designed and pretty luxe, though sometimes made with dodgy chemicals (looking at you, FEMA). But the old ones, oh my. As they fall into disrepair, trailers built before their components were standardized are impossible to fix. Home Depot doesn’t carry lilliputian doorknobs from 1962, or pentagonal screen doors with rollers made of unicorn hooves. NOTHING about them is easy or makes any sense. And that’s where I lived for almost a decade—in sheer impossibility.
I moved from one trailer to another within the same park because the landlord was a guy with a reputation for making fast, thorough repairs. The park staff didn’t do a great job on the unit my dad and I were in before, and as he got sicker I couldn’t take care of him AND fix everything myself, or finish the repairs left half undone in the worst way possible. When the kitchen sink was fixed the pipes weren’t reconnected afterward; I was blithely washing dishes and flooding our cabinets and floor with dirty dishwater.
This new guy used a local company that was supposed to be hot stuff, so even though my dad died a week before our move date I elected to go for it, thinking I could at least grieve in peace. Famous last words.
The trailer had problems so involved I can’t begin to relate them without shuddering: Dry rot down to the studs, leaking windows, a roof someone resurfaced with the wrong material, which curled like potato chips and blew away in the wind, and extensive water damage. Eventually both door locks dissolved, tumbler by tumbler, until the place couldn’t be secured except with a pipe dropped in the sliding glass door and a frail chain lock. The more dysfunction I uncovered, the more fascinating it was; not unlike seeing a body in decline, but much less painful to look at directly. And the people dispatched to fix it were a form of theater unto themselves.
I liked the first guy I met immediately because he looked like Henry Rollins, which is to say, like an aging lesbian (we’ll call him “Hank.”) Graying flattop hairdo, paunchy yet muscular, with kind brown eyes. With all these things going for him, his first day on the job he was supposed to deliver and set a possum trap in the yard. Instead he spied a broken one someone had left behind a shed on the lot, pulled it out and told me, “Just buy some cat food. You know how to set this, right?” I assured him I had no idea, and he played with the trap, which was rusted, uncooperative, unsettable. He nonetheless left it, not set and unbaited for me to deal with. I put a bowl of vegetable soup in it and caught nothing but flies.
Autumn’s first rain revealed a leaky window. Rather than caulk it he simply put a strip of tape over the top of the frame, then was perturbed when I had to call to report the leak was still there. “These things are so old it’s not worth it to work on them anymore,” he told me, a philosophy that virtually everyone who worked on the trailer seemed to share, though they were certainly willing to charge for their time. Hank was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, a fact I know because he spent a lot of time shouting into his iPhone while on the job, including a poignant conversation about wanting to invite a new friend to a movie but being afraid he’d be outed as “too worldly.” I was temped to report him to the Kingdom Hall myself when he started blasting The Commodores on my roof and singing “Brick House” in a tortured falsetto. Uch.
After him, my landlord had a neighbor come work on a new thermostat that the first guy had installed incorrectly. I used to work with this neighbor at an on-call job and thought he was nice enough if a little eccentric. “Grifty” fixed one problem with the thermostat, but in so doing knocked a wire loose that left the unit shorting out constantly. As he was the fifth person to work on a heater that was getting ever more suspect in my eyes I insisted a professional come in at that point. Instead Hank came back, but refused to touch the heater because it was working at that moment. He literally folded his arms and pouted, upset that his installation had not been perfect and I’d seen fit to ask that it be repaired. He left and I walked around outside to stay warm until an actual Heater Guy came a week later, touched the unit with one finger and said, “It’s unfortunate that nobody wanted to listen to you. That’s obviously shorting out.”
Heater Guy was one of the good ones, someone actually qualified to solve problems yet not so arrogant as to presuppose what was wrong, or that his work was infallible. My coworker, on the other hand, must have boosted a piece of my mail while he was inside, for he went on to use my personal information to fudge up a reference claiming me as a relative, then established a line of credit and wrote thousands of dollars in bad checks all over town. I dearly hope he goes to jail.
My landlord was a member of some Pentecostal church in town, and he brought a lot of church members by, hoping a random tongue of flame might gift them with magical plumbing abilities or something. This did not come to pass. I initially had my refrigerator decorated like a John Waters/Lady Gaga/Studio 54 dreamscape, but as my home kept hosting more and more Godly guys, with their phones blaring Christian rock at crotch level all day long, I started to take all my Keith Haring postcards and rainbow crapola down, and was soon just sporting one magnet holding a prayer sheet some woman handed me on the street called “The I AMS of God.” It would confuse me every time I saw it because I didn’t have a cat, yet here was a list on the refrigerator with IAMS on top in all caps. That was a difficult stretch.
There was one actual general contractor, himself yet another Pentecostal, who was good at his job and as a bonus named Shane, which made me titter into my sleeve for reasons he couldn’t grasp. Sadly, he left half his work unfinished to take another job, never filling the hole he’d made in my kitchen floor (not unlike the effect L Word Shane had on the hearts of the female populace). It took seven months of asking for my landlord to find another guy, this one on the west coast all the way from Arkansas to pursue his love of snowboarding. He was supposed to be a professional painter, but did not use a drop cloth and got paint all over everything he was close to, and he failed to patch the hole in the floor. He tried, but he failed. I thought he stood out as my first non-religious handyman at least, but I passed him on a street corner in December and he was twirling a giant “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” sign. We’d had an actual shouting match when he was working, due to my lack of appreciation at having to wash every surface he’d splashed with paint, and I wanted to blow past him and be mean, but instead I asked if he was sign-waving for a church. He said, “Oh, no, just for me.” We left it at that.
As it turns out my landlord, who characterized me as a mean-spirited perfectionist for wanting these jobs finished by competent professionals, had hired the snowboarder to work at his own place and, upon seeing him in action, immediately fired him. He did apologize to me, since I’d asked him to step in and prevent further damage to the trailer or my property, and he refused at the time. Turns out to be less fun when it’s your microwave he’s slopping semi-gloss on. I’d been giving my landlord lists of needed repairs from the time I moved in, at his request, only to be repeatedly ignored. This disaster seemed to finally focus him, and he said he was going to find someone to take care of all the loose ends. (Perhaps not coincidentally, he also sent me a one-sentence letter on a slip of paper the size of a cookie fortune informing me of a rent hike). OK, I thought, bring it on. Let’s fix this crap shack once and for all.
I had a long-standing leak in the kitchen ceiling that was not connected to the condition of the roof at all; the insulation had deteriorated to such an extent that condensation was forming on the inside of the metal roof, freezing, then thawing out and dripping into the room. One Sunday afternoon I was taking a much-needed coffee break after reviewing a pile of books, stepping outside to check the rosebushes and rest my eyes, when a carload of overdressed people pulled into my parking space. It was my landlord, in a suit and tie, and he brought forth a young guy in a leather jacket who appeared to be sucking on an elaborate fountain pen. The e-cigarette threw me a little, but the main thing about this guy was…have you seen these actual human males who look like Ralph Wiggum? He looked like that! Weirdly broad through the hips, with earnest but kind of tiny eyes and hair parted in the middle and strand-divided so it looked like someone drew it on with a Sharpie. If not Ralph Wiggum, then the love child of all Three Stooges. Apparently this guy was going to be bavenging all the misdeeds of the prior handymen, starting with a few small jobs, then working up to the kitchen ceiling. His qualifications? Well, not only was he a Pentecostal, he had worked with the licensed contractor before! Calloo callay! We set a date several weeks out and I forgot about him immediately.
Two days later I get a call. Ralph Wiggum wants to come this week, in two days in fact, and rather than prove his mettle on a small job he’s going to take down the kitchen ceiling and insulate it! This strikes me as a terrible idea, but as a renter there are limits to what I can refuse, apparently including the right to refuse handymen who want to steal my identity. The fact that I work from home draws nothing but blank stares from these men of God, so I rearrange my schedule and pray it’s all over quickly.
Ralph W. shows up and it begins to look as though he’s not terribly well prepared. His first words to me are, “I’m not going to be able to take this ceiling down without your help.” This is the point at which I should have asked him to leave. But I agreed to try.
I can’t even explain the process that went into the complete ruination of my kitchen ceiling. It ended up taking two weeks, at the end of which the ceiling had been pulled down in places, improperly insulated, the old sheetrock put back up despite being both wet and moldy, barely nailed into place, and—this was an off-white ceiling—sealed with enormous frosting smears of brown caulk. A significant piece of wood paneling had been pulled down and replaced with some ludicrously unmatched wood as well. I just mistakenly wrote “off-shite,” which is a perfect description of the ceiling I was left with. When I came home to find him sealing the cracks with Hershey’s finest and asked politely what in the holy hell he was doing, he said, “I thought it would match.”
ME: “But the ceiling is white!”
RALPH: “Yeah…my head’s kind of all over the place right now.”
The following week this same young man tore down a neighbor’s fence and rebuilt it, laying new posts and screwing one board at a time into place. It looked perfect, and I was simultaneously furious that he would put such care into this job after he’d so wrecked my place and impressed with his obvious talent. A few weeks went by where the last of the wood hadn’t been put into place, but when finished it looked beautiful. I asked my neighbor if he was going to have it painted and he smiled ruefully. “Pff, yeah, once the guy comes back and puts it together right. You can’t touch any of these boards or they’ll fall off. Dude used screws that were way too short!” Ah, there’s the rub.
This was the winter when California saw a record drought. What little rain there was, however, made its way down my bedroom wall in sheets and found a seam in the living room ceiling that went over time from a single drip to a five-stream water feature. I was running out of pots to contain it. Over five months the snowboarder, Grifty, the contractor, Ralph Wiggum, and the landlord himself not only couldn’t fix the leaks (which are admittedly hard to find and seal on mobile homes); none of them could successfully put up and anchor a tarp to simply keep the water out. So the landlord sent one more close, personal friend to see me, a squat man with a befuddled squint who disagreed with my request that he use a long tarp instead of two short ones. When the short ones failed, he brought a long one and put it up some distance from where the water was coming in. When he was leaving, he remarked, “I really don’t like roofing, but I hated—.” I misunderstood him to have said “pasturing,” and pictured him with a pitchfork, squinting angrily at some hay, but came to realize he had been a pastor. Anyone who can’t handle a tarpaulin should not be placed in charge of a flock of humans. And yes, the leak won that round, too.
I finally moved, and am currently in between addresses, living out of a few bags and boxes. While I can’t wait to find my forever (or at least for right now) home, one of the perks of being a couch-surfer is that I’m free from the gospel of mansplained misrepair for the time being.
Tags: heather seggel, home repair, misandry, poverty, weird true tales
Then there was the time I explained a problem to our maintenance guy, he denied that was it, my husband went down and said THE EXACT SAME WORDS to him and he went, “Oh!”
The transmission on my car died on a trip in July. We had it towed to a mechanic’s shop. I explain what the symptoms were to the guy behind the counter. He just looks at me blankly without writing anything down on his paper directing the mechanics what to look for. My brother-in-law was with me, and he steps in, describes the symptoms almost exactly the same way, except he threw the word gears in there, and guy behind the counter lights up, oh I see, writes it down on his sheet. Thereafter, every time guy behind counter came to talk to us about the car issues, he kept trying to talk only to my brother-in-law and would only look at him. Even though we both made it very clear that this was MY car and brother-in-law had absolutely no authority or influence.
I asked Beloved to accompany me to buy my car. I always do the negotiating, even when it’s his car. I only wanted to get his name on the title. That makes life easier when moving (we move often), being able to do business interchangeably, so we try to put both our names on everything.
But was my car. My Beloved never offered an opinion, never spoke to anyone but me. But dealership people keep talking to him. Beloved keeps redirecting them, “It’s her car; talk to her.” After the fifth time, I stood and offered to let them keep their car so they could sell it to a man. Abject apologies ensued and everyone began making eye contact with me to a disturbing degree. It’s the 21st century! Why is this still happening?
I think we need to start making the best of this by turning it into a game.
Lady: Boo!
Male partner: Boo!
Lady: Boogadee Boo!
Male partner: Boogadee Boo!
Lady: How long will the boiler take to fix? I LIVE IN A TREE AND THRIVE ON MISERY
Male Partner: How long will the boiler take to fix? SHE LIVES IN A TREE AND THRIVES ON MISERY.
Sexist Maintenance Guy: ???
I think my favourite thing about men is the way they assume that they are ‘handy’ just by virtue of being men, like it’s given to them at birth.
Even my husband, least mansplainy man ever (still does it sometimes) thinks he can do DIY easily, when drunk. He filled the holes in our walls left from when we got insulation free, and it’s dreadful. It’s all cackhanded.
cackhanded
NEW FAVORITE WORD THANK YOU, BB.
It means slightly rubbish, poor attempt, amateur work!
For example: That’s a cackhanded attempt at a treehouse = That treehouse was not installed very well
Incorporating it into my vocabulary starting now. I have a sinking suspicion that I will always say it “crackhanded,” though.
Clever Manka, using other people’s idioms in a cackhanded way since 1970.
I think also, originally, left-handed? Stupid lefties…always cacking things up.
My true reward for writing this was the gift of a new vocabulary word to totally misuse (says the person who thought “chuffed” meant either angry or possibly gassy for the longest time). Cackhanded no more. Or forever! I’ll get back to you!
Yes! Why doesn’t chuffed mean angry?! It certainly sounds angry. Chuffin’ angry.
I absolutely loved my ex-boyfriend’s attitude to DIY. He knew & accepted that he simply couldn’t do it. Even hanging up a shelf was an hour-long swearfest of epic-proportions. Afterwards he spoke these undying words: “Darling, next time I’m trying to attempt DIY, please call the police.” Go ex-boyfriend 🙂
I think my manmotor is broken. The number of things I think I can fix (outside of my profession – IT) could be counted on one hand. Even one that has survived an ill-thought encounter with a slightly less-than-sober chainsaw. This is my policy: I work and make money in part so that I can pay people who actually know how to do shit to do it right (Unfortunately they tend to be expensive! Who knew?).
Thankfully my wife doesn’t often expect me to fix things…but sometimes I can see something that might be disappointment in her eyes as she might be once again contemplating the fact that she has married an un-man of sorts.
I will admit that I sometimes think I know how some things work, at least on some level. I mean, I read about that one thing that one time on the internet….
While I would reject you as a man on the basis that I’m super-gay, I am one-hundred percent on board with your attitude toward repairs! You are not an un-man by any means, but someone who values his time and works to preserve it! Knowing what you’re good at and what is not for you is money in the bank in and of itself. Please continue to do as you have been and know I’m slightly jealous of your wife.
You are too kind! My own obsession with having things done right possibly outweighs my (potentially weak) innate male desire to “do it myself”.
Coincidentally or not (!), the best handypeople I’ve come across have been women. “Best” in the sense that, in addition to having yet to come across one lacking in competence, I find them easier to talk to and that they say more things that are actually helpful and not nearly as condescending. Men mansplain to men too (perhaps especially to ones they perceive as being less masculine for having to call them? Hah!) – and that bugs the hell out of me! I know when (and the time is coming again soon, wood is breaking!) the time comes to do handyperson stuff, when I’m digging through craigslist for unknown people to work on my house, I gravitate towards the handywomen.
There’s definitely some cognitive dissonance for me with all this, given the image of masculinity I was raised with (in my 30s, for context)…but for whatever reason, it’s a dissonance I really enjoy. Neighbor across the street is out working on the engine of *her* car while I’m gardening again? Check – she’s a trained diesel mechanic! She can repair giant motors on a giant fucking oil tanker or something.
Oof, this sounds utterly frustrating!
My boyfriend is completely useless at DIY house things so I always either do it myself or call the handyman/electrician etc. and make sure that my boyfriend stays upstairs in his office while they’re here so they speak to me. I’ve generally been quite lucky and found nice men. The man who did my kitchen was an adorable dream of a man.
Although once I was getting a quote off a plasterer and my dad popped round during it. Later, the plasterer phoned me and said, “I don’t know if I should talk to you or your husband?” He had thought my DAD was my HUSBAND. Ick! And also that other thing about once a man’s on the scene, he’s the one they want to communicate with. DAD! HUSBAND!
In the first trailer, when I was my father’s caregiver, I lost track of the times people would say “Husband…boyfriend…brother?” then be FLABBERGASTED when I told them he was my father and excused myself to go bathe in acid. But I totally used him to get repairs done while he was alive, since of course if I’m the one standing in a puddle there’s not a problem but if his socks are wet it must be a leak. Kill. Kill ’em all.
Yup, if there’s one thing men are good for, it’s standing in puddles to get other men to believe they are there.
Ugh, I was one looking at houses with a male housemate and the realtors would pretty much speak only to him and always assumed we were dating. The latter was fair enough until we started talking about which one of us would get which bedroom and they still referred to me as his girlfriend. On the plus side it did mean that I got out of talking to realtors which is terrible anyway, and once actually in the house I handled most of the small repairs.
Men’s ears cannot hear women’s voices; to men we sound like the adults in Charlie Brown (LA LA LA broken, LA LA LA Leak…)
It is genetic, I’m sure of it
I once spent a very painful half an hour on the phone with A Man from the cable company when I moved into a new apartment explaining that something was wrong with the cable signal. We went around in endless circles with the cable guy asking, begging, pleading with me to change the input on the television while I repeatedly answered that my television was set to the correct input and that I knew it was correct because I COULD SEE THE CABLE GUIDE WHEN I PRESSED INFO. He explained again how to change inputs. I reiterated that I had followed the HDMI cable from the box to my television once again and confirmed that the TV was set to the correct input, and again, I could see data being fed to my television from the cable box, I just was not getting an actual TV picture on any channel. He told me it was probably on the wrong input.
I hung up, called back, and scheduled a technician visit. Turned out the cable line leading from my apartment was not connected to anything, just dangling limply along the side of the house.
I once called the place where I’d bought my desktop to report that putting discs into my optical drive had no result, even though I could hear the disc spinning and the light on the front came on. The OS, meanwhile, was denying that the drive existed at all. The guy insisted that I’d have to join the queue so he could run a virus scan, even though I was insisting that they open the case and check the connections first. When I got my computer back, five days later, he informed me that, yes, a wire had come loose from the motherboard, but how were they supposed to know that? I dunno, maybe because I effing TOLD you that’s what was going on?
Just said this very thing to my husband last night. Not sure if he heard me.
This is so vivid it’s painful.
For every apartment I’ve ever rented, any issue or needed repair has followed the same path.
1. Landlord explains how we should try and fix it with stuff from Home Depot.
2. Friend of Landlord comes over and tries to fix it.
3. Unlicensed “Handyman” type guy comes over and tries to fix it.
4. Licensed general handyman (contractor?) comes over and tries to fix it.
5. Actual specialist (plumber, electrician) is finally called and the problem is fixed.
All five steps must be carefully observed, every time. No landlord will even just call the goddamn plumber the first time.
Even if it’s not religion-specific (the park where I lived was full of Jehovah’s Witnesses, then Mormons would come in and flyer everything, then I would go outside and sing “When you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way,” and do big leaps while brandishing an imaginary knife, but the Pentecostals had it in for ALL of us), I think there must be a Stations of the Cross of Home Repair, which you have outlined nicely here. Now I want a candle with these things pictured on it (candle should show water coming in near a sparking electrical outlet in at least one scene).
Can confirm that this applies to Hasidic Jewish landlords as well, of which I have had several.
“Oh, my brother-in-law didn’t fix the leak? I will send Shlomo over, he owns a wrench.”
Hey, I own a couple dozen hand tools. I can be a repairperson, too! Yeah. I’ll just fix your wiring for you. What do you mean when you ask, “is that grounded?”
I would buy tickets for that one-woman show.
“Yeah…my head’s kind of all over the place right now.”
Can you imagine if this were an allowable excuse in real life?
“Doctor, you were supposed to remove the spleen, not the kidneys!”
“Yeah…my head’s kind of all over the place right now.”
“Sir, you just told three separate aircraft they can land on runway 7 at the same time!”
“Yeah…my head’s kind of all over the place right now.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think using chewed-up Bazooka Joe gum instead of 3/4 inch steel bolts will keep this bridge standing!”
“Yeah…my head’s kind of all over the place right now.”
We hired a handyman/roof guy to fix the shingles and chimney of my grandmother’s cottage last summer. For the first week or so he was there he tore everything out and sealed it up with plastic and duct tape. Then he spent the second week sitting on the roof, doing nothing much and telling us it was too old to bother fixing. By that point we couldn’t hire a new guy since the top floor of the cottage was more-or-less being held for ransom. He was a slow, chatty talker too, always happy to tell you how things were going. Which I guess is how hi-how’s-it-going-are-you-going-to-do-the-shingles-yet kept getting billed as an hour of conversation. To his credit, a month later he was finished, which in that part of New Brunswick is practically a rush job.
My dad, who I love dearly, also fancies himself a handyman. He’s not very good, but the big problem is that he’s not medically well and will still go and work, grunting in pain, until somebody else comes out. He also has a pathological hate for rot. He found wet, rotting wood in the side of our cottage this summer and kept digging it out until he’d carved through the wall. That hasn’t been fixed yet, just sealed with caulking and electrical tape. My mum will likely hire a contractor to do it once my dad’s forgotten about it.
God, once they’re on the roof it’s the WORST! You can’t exactly go up there and push them off, and people will stop working for absolutely ANY REASON. During one of the leak-fails, my next door neighbor flagged down the guy throwing cinderblocks around over my head while I was trying to write a book review and engaged him in a lengthy discussion about the best way to get rid of a broken refrigerator. Which I guess got billed to my landlord. ???!?!?!?!?
Yes! Put a roof guy on a roof and it becomes his living room. I think it’s the height, and the unclaimed space.
I am so lucky that I’ve had only one male landlord. He was an absolute doll. Total pothead, and entirely reliable. Slow, but reliable. There was the time water heater in the basement broke at 9:15pm on a Saturday. I called him when I couldn’t get the (rusted shut) water main valve to budge. He listened to me panic for about thirty seconds before he drawled out “I’m…watching The…Big…Lebowski. I’ll…be there…when…I can.” Twenty minutes later (just long enough for him to come down) he was at my door with tools and buckets.
That man was a saint. I firmly believe there was only one of his type in existence. I miss him.
I’m generally no friend to potheads, but if it comes down to Cackhand v. Pothead I’m all in for The Dude.
My first landlord was a total pothead type too. One of the only apartments I actually got my deposit back from (in full no less, I believe)!
Bless him! The right type of hippie is the perfect type of landord because they really believe in fixing things. Any things. All things. They might not get stuff done quickly, but they get it done well.
My latest landlord was a lady who lives in California and gave zero fucks what we did to the house in Montana, as long as we didn’t burn it down. But when the pipes froze, she was no help. We unthawed them ourselves (New Adult Level: Unlocked). Now owning a house, I’m realizing how unhandy I am and how handy my partner is. It’s kind of hot, actually.
Uh, I think I was making a point somewhere in there.
My current landlord is very new to the game and it is AMAZING. The woman in the unit above me clued me in on his inexperience and I’ve groomed him with emails saying “this is broken so I am going to do this to fix it and then I will send you the bill”. AND HE JUST GOES ALONG WITH IT AND THINGS GET FIXED.
Glorious. I’m never moving.
My landlord is a doll as well – I fancy myself a pretty great tenant, so it all works out. But yes, we just call plumbers and send him the bill and then he says “thank you for dealing with that”. !
To be fair, my boyfriend is a property manager so has a stable of extremely good contractors who are extremely motivated to do the best work for the cheapest on our house so that the next time an entire apartment building needs to be re-piped he thinks of them. His plumber sent him a Christmas basket with so many amazing goodies last year, including a bottle of Basil Hayden’s bourbon, and a very nice salami that I immediately appropriate for “cooking”.
That’s the plumber of my dreams.
He showed up at our house to fix the heat on his way to his Italian family’s Christmas party last year. And charged us something like $112, including parts. He is the plumber of everyone’s dreams. There was also a bottle of very nice olive oil in his gift basket, and several large craft beers. And the best biscotti I’ve ever had. And a generous gift card to a restaurant. I mean.
Bwah? Does he WANT you to start intentionally clogging drains so he’ll have to show up with treats?
Hilarious, apart from all the horrid things you had to endure! Way to embrace the humor.
I’ve been pretty lucky with landlords, though my current one definitely does the unlicensed handyman thing, and last time the handyman told me to go to Home Depot, so, you know. And now that Mr Kat and I bought a house that’s been a bit neglected I’m learning all kinds of things about the trades, at least in this part of New Jersey. Like, sometimes a job is too small, and so NO ONE WILL TAKE MY MONEY to fix the hole we had to cut in the floor and subfloor to isolate the worst of the cat urine damage. Fun fact: sanding cat urine out of wood is like releasing a belligerent stink-genie.
And yes, sometimes I think none of these dudes (and they are all dudes) are actually listening to the words coming out of my mouth because I have a high-pitched voice and enormous titties.
Given how you phrased it I might have a hard time listening, too, but I would still have tried to fix your floor. (Pro tip: Animal pee goes all the way to infinity. Even if you currently live in China you might have to dig clear through to the US and then BACK to China before laying a new foundation).
Huge tracts o’ land!
Cat pee is a curse from the pantheon of vengeful ancient gods, I’m convinced of it. IT SHALL NOT DEFEAT ME.
Is it just me or are we a self-selecting group of disproportionately large-breasted people? (Disproportionate to the population, not necessarily to our other parts (though for me that is certainly the case).)
Are you Kristen Chenowith?
Oh my god you guys. This was the piece that I desperately needed at this moment in my life. Especially: “my landlord, who characterized me as a mean-spirited perfectionist for wanting these jobs finished by competent professionals”. I am so frustrated by being made to feel that I’m being “mean” by asking politely for basic things that I have already paid for.
Background – moved into an apartment two weeks ago. Utilities aren’t included, and my (female) roommates and I opened an account with the gas company and called them to have them come and turn on the meter the day we moved. After about five failed visits from various people associated with the gas company and the landlord, someone figures out after a week with no hot water that THERE IS NO METER. So we call the gas company and make an appointment to install a meter. We confirm this with them multiple times. The guy shows up and asks where the meter is so he can turn it on. We tell him we requested a meter to be installed. He does not like our tone! Don’t we know ANYTHING about gas meters?!?! We have a shouting match in which he mocks my roommate’s voice and I feel threatened enough to get the super on the phone to explain it to him. This man still can’t or won’t install a meter. Finally, our very nice super deduces that there is in fact a meter but it isn’t ours – it just LOOKS like ours. The landlord registered the meter for the restaurant on the ground floor incorrectly so the gas company THINKS we have a meter but we don’t. This is absolutely his screwup and he has to straighten out the record with the gas company so we have the capability to get a gas meter installed. He was informed of this four days ago. He now refuses to return our messages and has hung up on my roommate twice when she tried to follow up.
I’ve been called “babe” and asked to “be a little patient” and “understand how these things are” by various parties at this point. I’ve had several otherwise sympathetic people tell me that “not everything is a sexist thing, [male person] once had a problem with a plumber”. As for me I would simply like to take a shower that isn’t ice-cold and I would like to be able to use my stove so I don’t have to spend money eating out. I would also like to not be shouted at. We’ve spoken to the super since he is the person who is the most responsive and respectful, and he seems to be on the case. But boy oh boy, it’s making me angry, while simultaneously making me feel guilty for being so “difficult”.
And one day, children, I will tell you the tale of the apartment I had that sported a leak in the ceiling for eight months! That particular contractor almost gave me a heart attack because he climbed our fire escape and tapped on our window with a flashlight after night fell because he parked in the back and “didn’t want to walk around.” He also told me that I should try to “be sweet to me. I know how you get hysterical, the women, but it would be better to be calm.” When I told him that you can’t fix a pipe by wrapping it in duct tape he told me he had been a plumber for 20 years and he didn’t appreciate my casting aspersions on his professionalism.
Oh boy guys, rereading this I realized I’m being the boring person who wants to tell you everything that went wrong with their subway commute in this rant. Didn’t mean to be such a bore! The point is – this piece happened to strike quite a chord with me. Well done!
Not boring at all. Legitimately infuriating.
Dear God. What the hell. I am so sorry.
oh my GOD
I am ON FIRE with rage on your behalf
I will heat your house, hot water, and stove WITH THE POWER OF HOW MAD I AM
With regards to part two of your story, the only good ending would have involved kicking him off the fire escape or perhaps chopping his head in half with that Fighting Circle of Xena’s a la Sling Blade. My Landlord definitely made things harder for me by telling people I was a bitch before they even met me, but they dug the trench deeper by sharing that information with me. I wasn’t a bitch to begin with, but sure ended up as one.
Maybe google your local tenant’s-rights folks and see if they can help you at all?
Yeah, in Seattle there are restrictions on how long they can let you go without heat and/or water, I think. I hope there’s something similar in your city.
I am SO ANGRY about these assholes.
That said, I hope he actually used the phrase “casting aspersions on my professionalism.”
Yup yup I don’t know where you live but if there is a landlord-tenant dispute mechanism in your jurisdiction please look into making use of it. Here you would go to arbitration, get some money from your landlord (not lots, but some), and your landlord might be a bit chastened. This is unacceptable.
Also! In most places, landlords have to pay for you to stay in a hotel if they can’t provide you with things like heat and/or water. You also sometimes have the option to not pay rent for the days in which your home was unlivable. In my experience, jerk landlords (and their equally incompetent “handy”dude friend) get nice real quick when you print out the state statute that shows you can NOT PAY THEM and wave it in their puny little man faces.
Sorry. Rage.
My dad used to be a contractor, so he is legitimately handy; I have picked up a few skills here and there by virtue of living under the same roof as him for 18 years. My husband used to be TERMINALLY un-handy, he was the DIY/home repair antimatter, but now that he has worked as a roofer and as a concrete layer he has quickly levelled up into the realm of Legit Handyman.
The more work we do on our trailer, the more I’m realizing my boyfriend is not as handy as he thinks. I am not either, but at least I know it! When we were putting in new flooring we did the living room and hallway before he would admit that it was a hell of a lot of work and maybe we should hire someone to do it. We spent last weekend putting the baseboards back up and it turns out he’s very much of the “it’s close enough to the proper length, it’s fine” mindset and refused to go borrow the appropriate saw from a friend so we ended up having to use a huge reciprocating saw to cut everything.
I had a landlord imply that my roommate and I were prostitutes (because he saw us on the veranda smoking cigarettes with BOYS) and then attempt to brain a raccoon he’d trapped in the attic with a hammer (we did not allow this).
I also lived in a mess of a mobile home once! Literally no problem was ever repaired the entire time we lived there, no matter what it was. Excitingly, the heat would malfunction and fill the whole thing up with carbon monoxide sometimes! We had a carbon monoxide alarm, so when it went off, we’d open all the doors and windows, turn off the heat, and go stand outside in the cold till the house aired out (usually this was the middle of the night! So it was so awesome!) Our landlord was aware of this, but he assured us that A. carbon monoxide “didn’t really KILL people very often, just might make you a little sick” and B. we had an alarm, so….*vague shrug* This was a crappy rundown mini trailer park on the God forgotten ass-end of a tiny backwater little town in South Carolina, and my mother decided she’d rather move than escalate the whole thing. So some months later she gets a phone call from the police in that town – a family had moved into another trailer in the lot owned by the same jackass. Only he didn’t mention the frequent heat troubles that this trailer also had, and they all died from carbon monoxide poisoning! They wanted her to confirm that he knew at least one trailer had a carbon monoxide problem and didn’t do anything about it. He went to jail for negligent something or another in the long run.
omg that story ended terribly! I’m glad the idiot went to jail though.
It was really sad. I genuinely think that guy didn’t think people could die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Because he was really a fucking idiot.
WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. I can’t even with this.
I am now super paranoid about carbon monoxide though. I bought one for my most recent place…and then it dawned on me that everything it was electric. I was like uh well better safe than sorry??
Better to have it than not, IMO. I think fire and CO detectors are considered standard everywhere now?
Yeah now I see them a lot. This was back in…uggh, man. The early ’90’s?
That is HORRIFYING! And the tone of, Eh, *shrugs*, so you get a headache, big whoop, is eerily familiar.
I am so happy that my dad used to work in construction and is now a mechanic because he pretty much knows how to fix everything, but he is absolutely useless with technological things, as is boyfriend, so I’m usually the go-to person there even though I’m not exactly computer-inclined either.
One of the most frustrating hours of my life was when I called tech support and listened to a guy painstakingly describe every single detail of three different troubleshooting scenarios I had already told him I’d tried at the start of the phone call. I would’ve interrupted with “DUDE I DID THAT ALREADY”, but he always described them as if they were going to be a magical, different solution (i.e., go into This Folder and Open This Tab and oh, you want me to clear my cache, right, I did that)
My husband is the son of a contractor, so he is handy…to a fault. And ungodly cheap. So he or his dad must do everything themselves. When they have time. Even if it means that the rotted out threshold of the back door has a plastic bag stuck in it the whole winter, letting in cold air and moisture to the porch room and ruining the tiles, because he is too busy with school and work to fix it and won’t hire someone. Let me just say that we are not destitute. We could easily afford to have it fixed.
We fight about it a lot. I don’t see the point in letting our hundred year old house fall into disrepair because he’s too cheap to fix it, and then it costs so much more. But that is the way of his family, waiting for disaster so all their fatalism about life can be confirmed, so I become shrill harpy until he does something about it. It only works 75% of the time.
Sometimes I take a day off of work to meet a repairman at my house. After the repair is complete, I might tell the Beloved about it. But usually I don’t ever mention it because it was a repair he’s been insisting he will accomplish “soon”. I have zero patience with “soon”. I silently set a mental deadline by which I will call a pro. It helps my blood pressure.
Hi Heather! Good to see you here as an author again. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a repair that was not at all interesting? You know, a competent person shows up on time with the correct tools and just gets it done. Does that ever happen?
It’s a beautiful dream, but apparently you have to read historic YA fiction to find a kindly neighbor who will patch your roof while not simultaneously pirating your cable or pocketing your bus pass. Payment? Why a few apples off your tree will suffice just fine. I’m actually going to write that story so I can rent space in it.
I started typing out a complicated story about wiring and 3-way light switches at my office and a mansplaining electrician. But it was too complicated a boring. To summarize, I had a 30+ minute argument with an electrician who insisted that I did not know what I was talking about, when all I wanted was for him to reverse the polarity on a light switch. When he finally LISTENED to what I was saying, instead of just smirking and shaking his head about oh-how-cute-this-girl-thinks-she-knows-wiring, it took him less than 2 minutes to fix it.
I feel good in knowing that I just refused to back down about it, and didn’t even change the way I was explaining what I wanted done, I just kept repeating it slower and slower, like he was the biggest idiot I had ever spoken with, until he finally got it. Later I checked with my partner, who is an excellent handyman, and he assured me that I had indeed used all the right words and that this electrician was just not listening. Also, my entire office (on that day all women) got to listen to me have a battle of the wills with this idiot.
I am really glad that my partner is a handyman, so I have limited reason to ever interact with the Mansplaining Idiots of Home Repair.
It’s good to have a tale of victory in the face of utter dur-duhhh-itude to swim against the current here! And I love your username. Totally not going to cry thinking about it…oops…
My username does not mean what you think it does. I had to look it up to figure out what you were talking about. I made that my name because my ‘Pin name was VerityStandingStill and intense debate wouldn’t accept that, and I liked the sound of it (all aboard the truth ship!). Just a coincidence!
Ha, eating my words about assumptions from earlier! Thanks for the clarification and sail on.
Ah, yes, the helpful handyman or maintenance staff. Particularly the one who told me that the reason I was getting fluctuating scalding hot and freezing cold water in my shower was because I had replaced their (cheap and crappy) shower head with a decent one. He cheerfully reinstalled their shower head and left. Guess what?
Yeah, I didn’t have a steady stream of hot water in the shower from then till I moved out. It just wasn’t worth calling them in just to have them mansplain how it was either all my fault or completely in my head.
Ah, yes, the helpful handyman or maintenance staff. Particularly the one who told me that the reason I was getting fluctuating scalding hot and freezing cold water in my shower was because I had replaced their (cheap and crappy) shower head with a decent one. He cheerfully reinstalled their shower head and left. Guess what?
The estate agent responsible for managing my flat is mainly pretty good, as are the tradespersons he sends, but there have been a few incidents. Such as:
– Putting on the central heating for the first time and discovering that the decorators had not screwed them back on properly after removing them to repaint the walls. Cue smelly water dripping all over the floor.
– There is a damp problem in the flat. Whenever we report it, the discoloured bits of wall just get repainted. They then fail to dry properly due to the dampness. At one point they did a fairly messy undercoat of white (the wall is mainly cream) and left it like that for several months before they came back to do the top coat.
– Whenever repainting gets done we find flecks of paint all over the floor, plug sockets, light switches, etc.
Also, everything to do with the plumber. In our first weeks in the flat he came round to fix a leaking tap. I was asked to be his “beautiful assistant” and patronised hugely (he was AMAZED that I knew where the stopcock was). On multiple occasions the estate agent allowed him into the flat without the required 24 hours’ notice (saying, “Okay, I’ll let the plumber know that needs fixing” does not count as notice). When the radiator leak was happening, he came round without notification while I was at work, which I only discovered when I got home and found that the containers we’d put on the floor to catch the leaks had been moved but the radiators were still dripping, resulting in a flooded floor. When he came back round to fix this and I mentioned it, he crossly said that it was annoying for him to have to keep coming back. After he had finished, as I was feeling the radiators to check whether the dripping had stopped, he grabbed my wrist, pressed my hand against the radiator, and said, “What, don’t you trust me?”. And then didn’t get why I was upset. My partner and I have since said we refuse to have him in the house.
This story is scary and awful, but I would like you to explain, or feel free to put on a little mustache and mansplain since in this context I don’t mind, WHAT a stopcock is! Giddy with new vocabulary words to chew on today. (I assume it’s on the underside of the radiator and holds or fails to hold the water in? But it’s best not to assume, yes?)
A stopcock is a valve-thing that allows you to turn your property’s water supply off, so plumbers can do stuff without getting water everywhere. *twirls moustache* (The Wikipedia article, hilariously, says “Not to be confused with Cockblock” at the top, which I have never thought to do previously but now want to do on every occasion possible.)
Guys are cat-like in their independence and long silences
man and here I would have said guys are cat-like in their incapacity to stop making essentially meaningless noises as loud as they can all day long and sprawling on you all the fucking time even if you completely have something better to do. In fact I do say that. I want to know the cats you know.
ALL OF THIS SO ANGRY GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Oh, but this piece was beautifully written and hysterically funny and you are wonderful please never change.
So many feelings about DIY and repair.
I have a long and still ongoing story about how my disabled roommate has lost his homeowners insurance and how I am the primary worker bee on all these projects that need to be done. I will someday write all of this down in essay form when I’m not angry and subtweeting about him and the work.
i have a female landlord, who is also a close friend, and whenever something is broken her response is to call in a professional, send her an invoice and make the problem go away. i realise now how blessed i clearly am.
We had a problem with our boiler. Plumber arrives, does some tests, says “it’s a gas leak. I have to condemn your boiler”. I say, in a perfectly measured tone (particularly given that it was late on a Saturday morning and neither me nor my boyfriend had showered or eaten yet, because gas leak) “Oh. How long does that mean the boiler will be out of action for?”. He says “CALM DOWN. JUST CALM DOWN. I’LL FIX IT, THAT’S MY JOB”. I silently exited the room. Boyfriend asks him the same question 1 minute later: “no worries mate, just a couple of hours or so”. I am still cross about this. We use a different plumber now.
It was hard for me to want to read the rest of this article after the “Cool Girl”ness of the first paragraph.
You were right to stop. My coolness has been known to injure the unprepared. Safe travels to you!
I don’t know, I thought it was kind of wonderful. I mean, “gather round, my fellow persons, to see how I was made a misandrist by these [insert your favorite insult here]s.”
That’s a really good point, thank you for your perspective!
To clarify, I wasn’t trying to be mean/insulting with my comment – I’m simply so used to having my hackles raised by sentiments which imply that one is “not like other girls” or pandering to men/the status quo in some way that I am extra sensitive to these sentiments, and The Toast seems like one of the few safe spaces in which one can express hesitations such as these. My apologies to the author, as it must have come across differently than I intended.
No apology necessary–the brevity of your comment left me little to focus on except the “cool girl” part, which made me laugh out loud as I am 44 years old and have been bullied, excluded or otherwise ostracized in most social settings throughout my life. As a lesbian it’s often assumed that I hate men, when nothing could be farther from the truth. I am genuinely happier when I have male friends, and have found myself in the unenviable position of being a bad platonic girlfriend to friends who complain about their boyfriends, as I tend to see the male side of the situation more readily and sympathetically. So it was jarring for me to be repeatedly confronted with male “handy” men who embodied the absolute worst, most cliched aspects of misogynist stupidity. My instinct was to want to speak to them as equals, but clearly that’s not possible when someone is looking at you as an ignorant inferior. Yet I was freshly insulted and infuriated every time. I apologize for the snarkiness of my reply–you’re absolutely correct that this is a safe haven for a more generous spirit of inquiry, though at 44, queer and de facto homeless at present I do feel comfortable defining myself as not like other “girls”…and most women. 🙂
Yes, I can’t even imagine how infuriating that would be, I don’t know how you didn’t take a hammer to the lot of them! Thanks so much for your reply!
I love that The Toast is a space like that, and I totally get where you’re coming from, by the way.
You were right to stop. My coolness has been known to injure the unprepared. Safe travels to you!
No apology necessary–the brevity of your comment left me little to focus on except the "cool girl" part, which made me laugh out loud as I am 44 years old and have been bullied, excluded or otherwise ostracized in most social settings throughout my life. As a lesbian it's often assumed that I hate men, when nothing could be farther from the truth. I am genuinely happier when I have male friends, and have found myself in the unenviable position of being a bad platonic girlfriend to friends who complain about their boyfriends, as I tend to see the male side of the situation more readily and sympathetically. So it was jarring for me to be repeatedly confronted with male "handy" men who embodied the absolute worst, most cliched aspects of misogynist stupidity. My instinct was to want to speak to them as equals, but clearly that's not possible when someone is looking at you as an ignorant inferior. Yet I was freshly insulted and infuriated every time. I apologize for the snarkiness of my reply–you're absolutely correct that this is a safe haven for a more generous spirit of inquiry, though at 44, queer and de facto homeless at present I do feel comfortable defining myself as not like other "girls"…and most women. 🙂
I rented from a company for two and a half years; over the course of the last year, I called and e-mailed and visited on a weekly basis because my bathroom (and, quickly, bedroom, and then THE REST OF THE APARTMENT) was being invaded by those big, ugly roaches. I spoke directly with the person who handles maintenance concerns, too.
On my move-out bill? A charge for “unreported insect infestation”.
Guess what I didn’t pay because I raised the holiest of hell. And had a record of when I’d called/visited, who I spoke to, AND the e-mails I’d sent. Bastard people.
As for a gas leak – well I’d recommend a C02 alarm for starters. Still glad it’s all sorted now, still that said I’ve never had any problems with the heating engineer I use from STL Heating. Whenever I need them they’re out same day, the engineer always has a friendly, helpful attitude and does a good job with no mess and and never leaves me hanging around for hours. So I’d given them a go next time !
As for a gas leak – well I'd recommend a C02 alarm for starters. Still glad it's all sorted now, still that said I've never had any problems with the heating engineer I use from STL Heating. Whenever I need them they're out same day, the engineer always has a friendly, helpful attitude and does a good job with no mess and and never leaves me hanging around for hours. So I'd given them a go next time !
Some of them can be difficult.
Some of them can be difficult.