A Battle Unfought

You may recall that on Christmas Eve the landlord came around and plastered this horseshit onto everyone's front doors...

This was drafted by the new woman in the front office—Gwen—who has an apparent fondness for threatening termination of one's lease in every piece of correspondence she authors.

But now, as Kitten has reported, we've had the pleasure of hearing from Gwen again—via the letter she left on our door this past Tuesday in response to Kitten's December 19^th complaint about Ruth's camera being pointed directly into our apartment.

Here's that little gem...

If I had to rate Ms. Gwen's lovely personality—specifically, the way she insists on addressing us like a pre-school teacher might reprimand a room full of four-year-olds—I might utilize the same tone and pattern she employed in her opening paragraph...

Sometimes in our bitchy bitchiness we forget that our bitchiness sure does make us look bitch-tacularly bitchy. Please take this bitchiness as a reminder and a warning that you ARE, in fact, a big fat bitch... and big fat bitches eventually get checkmated.

(Also, you have the IQ of a turnip; and no one cares what you have to say.)

All that being said, I have been fuming about the "power strip and extension cord" bit since Christmas—largely since I have more crap plugged in just at my desk than we have enough wall outlets to accommodate throughout our entire apartment.

But, having received this second letter from her earlier this week, I decided it was worth spending a day putting in the effort to trounce her... and that this trouncing absolutely needed to be as big and as public as possible.

So...

I spent a couple hours penning a pretty excellent "anonymous letter" with the intent to blast out a copy to every apartment in our entire complex.

But, literally as I put the finishing touches on my first draft and was considering heading out to the store to drop $100 on stamps, our camera spotted our maintenance guy Ralph coming up the stairs to leave a amended corrections on our door and Ruth's.

Even still, I had worked long and hard on this letter, and I went "full Tyson" in unloading on this bitchy bitch and her bitchy bitchiness...

I had even taken the opportunity to impart some wisdom to my fellow tenants on the actual rules of power strips and extension cords: Why settle for just scrawling a hit piece, when I could bequeath to my neighbors (most of whom I also detest) a public service announcement as well?

Thus, I felt that it would be a shame not to let this little masterpiece see the light of day in at least some small capacity... So, on that note, here it is.

Enjoy.

Hi there, neighbor!

I'm writing in regards to the remarkably disingenuous letter we all had posted on our doors recently (on Christmas Eve of all days).

Now, if you're like me—and you've read the actual terms of the lease you signed,and educated yourself on the measures actually set forth in the version of the National Electric Code that Morrisville Borough has adopted—then you likely found this letter and the threats made therein to be somewhere between mildly amusing and incredibly infuriating. Perhaps you even went for a three-pointer as you balled the stupid thing up in your fist and lobbed it at your garbage can the moment you finished reading it.

But, then again... if you're not like me, then maybe you really don't know just how far off the mark the claims made in this letter are. Perhaps you've spent the better part of the last three weeks legitimately terrified at the idea that you could actually be evicted over a matter as trivial as an extension cord!

So, just to disambiguate a few things for the sake of clarity and our collective sanity, let's go ahead and take a quick gander at reality together and contrast the veracity of what actually is, against the fantasy being portrayed in the landlord's letter of dipshittery and deceit.

Ready? Go!

Let's start with the shitgibbon in the front office, since she's the one who chose to instigate this issue in just about the worst manner possible: Rather than take the more sensible approach of drafting a polite letter, conveying plain facts, and delivering said letter on just about any day besides one of the biggest holidays in modern Western civilization, well... she just couldn't resist going with the polar opposite: Her letter reads like she paid the local kindergarten class a visit and offered to pay "Dipshit Derek" a nickel to see how many threats, lies, and inaccuracies he could fit on one page.

And, man, did that kid deliver! This letter sucked—in every possible way, and on every possible level. But then, that might just be because Front-Office Fannie here seems to be a one-trick pony whose only tool in her entire interpersonal communications arsenal is to threaten to arbitrarily terminate leases.

I'm not sure it's even possible to overstate just how poorly played this approach is, from the perspective of [Redacted] Apartments and [Redacted] Management: Forget about how off-putting it may be to deal with a landlord who comes off like a grade-school hall monitor wielding her precious little modicum of power over your head; and, instead, take a moment to stop and appreciate the thoroughly unenviable position in which [Redacted] Apartments and [Redacted] Management find themselves in a legal sense, when an agent of theirs decides to make baseless but menacing threats like this—en masse and in writing, no less!

But, while addressing your tenants like a condescending fucknozzle is merely criminally stupid from a business standpoint, knowingly passing lies off as truth and threatening to enforce fictitious lease terms while so many actual lease terms remain unenforced day after day is full-blown stupidly criminal: It places [Redacted] Management squarely in prosecutorial limbo and leaves them open to a world of potential litigation at the mercy of an overzealous lawyer... someone who loved playing hall monitor so much as a kid that he went and made a full-blown career out of it.

The plain truth of the matter is that this sort of menacing overbearingness—paired with an expressed intent to enforce arbitrary rules not covered anywhere in the verbiage of our leases—is precisely the sort of thing that leads to tenants joining together and calling their landlords' bluff by pursuing a class action lawsuit to force them to put their money where their fat, lying mouths are! Personally, if I were Front-Office Fannie, I'd be rushing out to to buy up a bunch of gift cards and a box of Hallmark's most festive-looking “Sorry I Was Such an Assclown” card, and I would literally be begging you not to band together and sue the ever-loving crap out of me right about now.

But, hey... that's just me.

At any rate, two very important things are true here: First, there is absolutely nothing in the lease you signed, by which you agreed to forgo the use of extension cords, power strips, or wall taps. Considering that these buildings were constructed in the 1960s—well before most of us were even alive—there is just no way in hell that the average person is getting by with the meager handful of wall sockets available to us in our individual apartments. The world has, after all, changed just a tad in the last half a century, and we're considerably more connected and dependent on our electronic devices—and the substantial amount of electricity they require—than people were in the 1960s.

Second, there is similarly nothing in the electric code that Morrisville Borough has chosen to follow that expressly forbids any and all use of extension cords, power strips, and wall taps! Instead, there are guidelines around the proper use of these devices; but, unlike the baseless ramblings shat forth by some know-nothing desk-jockey in the letter we all received, these guidelines are fully backed by a reality in which electricity has the potential to behave in catastrophic ways when you fail to comprehend the dangers and you misuse conveniences like extension cords, power strips, or wall taps.

Since I happen to be of the belief that you should not have to have your apartment burn to the ground because of your neighbor's stupidity, allow me to play devil's advocate and see if I can better convey the message that the landlord should have conveyed instead of going full-on nuclear and trying to scare you into throwing away all your power strips and living by candlelight like some stone-age caveman.

The simple truth of the matter is that, if you knew the dangers of using these things improperly, you'd be scrambling hand over fist to fix your janky-ass wiring of your own accord, even without the threat of Front-Office Fannie or some voyeuristic nanny-state code inspector breathing down your neck. And, while I don't have the space here to give you a complete crash course in Electricity 101, you can always ask ChatGPT to explain it to you if you'd like. The most important takeaway is the one you already know: Electricity can kill, and electricity can start fires—both with remarkable ease!

Electricity becomes dangerous when you start playing with it without understanding what you're doing: If you've ever needed to use a power strip—but you were too far away from a wall socket, and so you plugged your power strip into an extension cord to get it to where you needed it—you have played with fire! Electrical resistance increases with cord length, which results in more voltage flowing through the cord to power everything you have plugged in. This generates heat... and everyone over the age of three knows what happens when something gets too hot.

...Anyone? ...Anyone? Right, it catches fire.

Similarly, plugging a power strip into another power strip is also a good way to have a bad time. Yes, all of the stuff you plug in will probably power right up and work just fine... until the moment that it doesn't. This is called overloading your circuit. Think of it like having a shelf on your wall, and then putting way more weight on that shelf than it can support: Eventually the shelf will fail, but that won't necessarily happen at the exact moment you overload it. It could happen while you're not home, or sometime in the middle of the night. Hopefully there's nothing important—like a sleeping baby—underneath it when it does! The same thing happens when you plug too many things into the same circuit: It just takes one of those things to draw too much amperage (electrical current), and all sorts of not-so-fun things can happen: Spikes in voltage can damage other electronics plugged into the same circuit, and again an excess of generated heat can lead to the same fire risk we've already discussed.

This is precisely why the building code that's being enforced does expressly forbid what's called “daisy-chaining” multiple power strips (or power strips and extension cords) together—and also why you should never plug beefier appliances like refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners, and so on into a power strip (but rather directly into the wall). Basically, if your wall sockets look like a Swiss army knife of strips and cords all plugged into each other one after the other, you're probably doing it wrong.

There are all sorts of additional common-sense guidelines that the inspector may point out to you:

• Don't run your extension cords across the middle of a room or a hallway where someone might trip on them (thereby pulling them half out of the wall and risking a loose connection with exposed prongs that can potentially start a fire).
• Don't let your power strips dangle from the wall socket (for the exact same reason).
• Try not to use cords substantially longer than you need to—and don't keep excess lengths of cord coiled up on themselves such that the potential build up of heat can become an issue.
• And so on.

Mostly, just use your brain: If it feels stupid, it probably is—and it's not worth losing your life over :)

But at the end of the day, there is no law on the books that says you cannot use a power strip or an extension cord—and anyone making the claim that there is should be promptly hauled into court and slapped with steep enough penalties that they have no desire to utter such nonsense ever again. Always know your rights and stand your ground!

The law says that these devices should not be used as permanent wiring—meaning that neither your landlord nor your electrician (nor you) should be splicing power strips and extension cords into the building's internal wiring that connects your various wall sockets, switches, and so on.

Extension cords, power strips, and wall taps are meant to be used as temporary wiring... and, guess what? If yours are anything like mine, you can just reach out and unplug them from the wall any time you want! It doesn't get much more temporary than that; does it?

So, I fail to see the issue here that led some pissant in the front office to go full-blown Scrooge and try to ruin your Christmas Eve with her shitty attitude and her mendacious little mcNuggets of coal.

Alas, you can't spell power strip without power trip... and, at the end of the day, that's all this was.

Let's hope she gets better soon!

Godspeed,

    ~ wintermute

But, I guess enough other tenants had beat me to the punch in complaining first...

And so, here's the aforementioned follow-up letter, in which O Bitched One walks back every single claim she had made in the original...