The rest of last night

was a disaster, though not for the reasons I had anticipated.

It’s hard to accuse someone else of screwing up when you find that you yourself are a bigger screw-up.

Turns out The Prof did go to the math lab yesterday. He showed up an hour late, but he went. He didn’t over-sleep; his late arrival was on purpose. He didn’t call them to let them know he’d be late. He told me that if he’d woken up enough to call, then he might as well have just gone in on time, so he elected to go back to sleep and not call. I don’t like the way he approached the situation, but then I don’t have to like it. It’s his job, and so it’s his call how to handle it responsibly.

Besides, I screwed up bigger than he did.

Along about mid-April, I dragged The Prof down to the apartment’s management office. I wanted to find out exactly what our options were for giving notice on the lease. As I understood things going in, we had to give two months notice prior to the lease end to break it. We knew that The Prof wouldn’t know about his new position until mid-May though, giving us only a month and a half to give notice in (at that point we thought we wouldn’t be moving unless The Prof got the new position).

What I proposed doing with the management was taking the apartment on a monthly basis after the lease was up, until we knew if we wanted to renew for a year or not. The woman in the office didn’t seem too sure of this, but then she said “You know, you just have to give two months notice to us.” Oh? Well, we could do that, we just couldn’t give two months notice before the lease was up. She promised to have the manager herself call us, just to make sure things were sorted out, and to see if there were any other alternatives. The manager never called, but I didn’t see that as any big deal. The office only followed up on about half the requests I ever gave them over the past two years anyhow, and I had my answer that I needed.

So when we had to renew our lease a week ago, I had no problem signing on the dotted line. We still didn’t know if there would be an apartment coming available at the place we wanted to move to, and if one did come available, we’d have more than two months notice to move into it, so we’d be well within the necessary time frame. Everything seemed to be falling together perfectly.

An apartment of the style we wanted came up the end of last week. It would be available for rental starting mid-July. This was getting more and more perfect. We’d only be in her an extra month, I had plenty of time to give the two months’ notice, and there’d be a two week overlap between moving out of the old and into the new, making moving a more laid back, easy affair.

I should have known things were too good to be true.

The office manager of our current complex called me just as I was ready to leave for the library yesterday afternoon. “I just got a verification of address from another apartment complex,” she said. “Are you planing to move?”

Well, yeah, we were looking into it, I told her. “May I ask why?” she wants to know. I refrained from starting in on my list of problems, and just stated the first thing that came to mind, that they’d increased the rent. “Oh, is that all?” she says. “We can probably work out a deal for you with that. I’m prepared to offer you $10 off your monthly rent.”

[aside: Just like that!? If they’re prepared to chop $10 off the monthly rent with absolutely no negotiation, then how dare they ask for a $50/month rent increase! They should have just asked for $40 increase to begin with. Besides, $10 doesn’t pay for a decent pizza. And it would still leave my rent $90 higher than the rate I signed up for two years ago, when they told me that there were hardly ever any rate increases and I could depend on the rate they’d given me for a while.]

I told her that we’d found a place for only a little more money that had a lot more space. I told her we really needed a three bedroom at this point, and I’d been informed in the office that no three bedrooms were coming available at our current location. “I’ve just received notice on a three bedroom coming up on July first,” was her immediate response. Again I refrained from saying the first thing that came to mind. I also told her that The Professor was waiting on a job offer and that we would need a place mid-way between his new job and mine should he get the position.

“Well, you know you just renewed the lease,” is her next comeback. “You’ll be paying significant penalties if you leave before it’s up.”

WHAT! “Why wasn’t I told this when I came to your office last month? I explained about the job situation then!” So she wants to know who I spoke to, what they said. She said she’d “see what she could do” for me.

This translates to “I’m royally screwed.” The penalty for breaking the lease is two month’s rent. And this will be post-rent increase. If The Prof doesn’t get the new position, then we’re going to have to stay right where we are. If he does get it, it’s going to cost me nearly $1800.00 to break this lease so we can move to be nearer his job.

Serves me right. I should have gotten it in writting. I should have followed up when the complex manager didn’t get in touch with me as promised. “Should have’s” won’t do me a bit of good now, though.

I wanted to cancel this weekend’s getaway, but The Prof kicked up a fuss about it. He wants to go. He wants to have a weekend away. However, he’s not planning on getting up until noon on Saturday, which means we’ll spend Saturday afternoon driving, get there late afternoon, stay overnight, wait till he gets up noon on Sunday, maybe get a hike in and then have to turn around and come right back home. I don’t have the money for that, I don’t feel like wasting my time that way, and I’m just not in the mood to get away at this point. His throwing a fit about it means I’m probably going to have to grit my teeth and do it though.

Whoopee.

Oh yeah. The Prof came to bed around 2:00, and woke me up to tell me not to lie awake worrying about the apartment situation. He then went to sleep. I lay awake from 2:00 to 3:30 worrying about the apartment situation.

Just shoot me.