Greetings, friends. (LXXIII)

Greetings, friends. In the last couple days, I’ve been trying to apply a lesson I’ve learned about my temper.

Years ago, I had the honor to have on my engineering team at work a colleague named Andy. Andy was one of the most brilliant engineers I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

One day Andy was complaining to me, as his manager, about something that he had been relying on me to do, I don’t recall what, but which I hadn’t done. I told him I would try harder to do it next time.

Andy said to me, “I don’t need you to try harder. I need you to try better. Tell me what you are going to do differently so that this gets fixed.”

The framing of Andy’s request has stuck with me for a long time.

Back to my short temper. The word temper, used in a blacksmithing context, basically refers to the balance of toughness and resilience in a piece of worked iron or steel.

As a human with a short temper, this means I have relatively low resilience to stress. Always have had. Low frustration tolerance, wrote the child psychologist.

Did I inherit my lightning quick limbic response from my mother, or acquire it from her by example? Who can say. Probably both. I remember my paternal grandfather as being grouchy with very little warning, before age mellowed him out a bit. So I might get it coming and going. The truth is that I can flash over to fight-or-flight with terrifying speed, and I usually land on fight.

Undoubtedly, this hair-trigger belligerence may have served my simian ancestors in some meaningful way, but it has done me about as much good in my life as you might expect. Certainly, getting angry feels very gratifying in the moment.

But I don’t think I’ve ever worked a single full-time job where I didn’t at some point have someone tell me that I needed to rein in my emotional response. Honestly, it’s embarrassing. I’m a grown adult and I’m supposed to be a professional.

Even in non-professional contexts, I find I often don’t get what I want out of conflict-prone situations, because I’ve already put off the other person with my bellicose attitude.

So, following Andy’s framing, I’ve been trying better by focusing on maintaining an even vocal tone during interpersonal conflict, and by refraining from using aggressive language when I’m annoyed. If I can muster it, I try very hard to smile while I’m saying something that I think the other person doesn’t want to hear, even if it’s over the phone.

When I moved to the Portland area a year ago, I rented an apartment in a brand-new building on the Vancouver waterfront with a view of the Columbia River, because the economics of moving from California to Washington, while keeping my job in the process, made it particularly affordable.

Really it was the view of the river that sold me. “Roll on, Columbia, roll on, your power is turning darkness to dawn,” Woody Guthrie once sang.

The building itself was developed by a commercial real estate investment firm in San Francisco, a company which I only later learned has a reputation there for being a bit on the rapacious side.

So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when, about six weeks before my lease was up, the building management offered me another twelve month lease with a $1,000 discount, or a month-to-month lease at a 30% rent increase. I knew I didn’t want to stay in that building for another whole year, and I wasn’t going to pay San Francisco prices to live in Vancouver, Washington, so I got the hell out of there.

So I really shouldn’t have been too surprised when they returned only about $200 of my $500 security deposit. I called up their business office to ask about the charges on the balance statement. I was able to determine that I really did owe them about $140 in utility bills, which was fine, but what about this $165 “standard cleaning fee”?

“Oh, that’s just standard,” said the assistant management flunky over the phone, “We charge that fee to all tenants on move-out.”

“But I left the apartment in its original state,” I said, “Broom clean, exactly according to the move-out instructions.”

“This is just a standard fee,” she insisted, “Every apartment building in the area charges a fee like this to pay for professional cleaners —”

I cut her off. “I’m not asking about other apartments in general, I’m asking about the apartment I leased from your company. I left the apartment in exactly the state that I was instructed. Would you please reimburse this fee?”

Apparently I had been slightly too sharp, because the lady got instantly frosty.

“You’ll have to talk to the finance manager about that, and she won’t be back until tomorrow,” I was told. She gave me the person’s name, and hung up. Oops.

Meanwhile, my limbic system was in full rage mode. I harbored all kinds of fantasies about what I was going to do. I considered an office sit-in. I considered flaming bags of excrement at the front door. I considered nasty reviews on Google. I looked up small claims court. I looked up class action lawsuits.

I knew any of these responses was going to cost me more of my time than the $160 was worth. Heck, even just filing a case in Clark County small claims court was going to cost me $50.

I’m privileged enough to be able to write off $160 of lost money and not regret it much. If the thief had been a less privileged individual than I am, I’d probably curse their name and let it go at that. At the same time, I’d be goddamned before I let some sharks who owned an apartment building worth hundreds of millions of dollars rob me of my $160. By God, there is a principle at stake.

So I found a copy of the lease, in which the “Wear and Tear Addendum” did indeed absolve me of liability for, well, ordinary wear and tear. None of the specific carveouts in the addendum applied. Moreover, it waived a “standard fee” in favor of fees for “cleaning as needed”.

Well, I called back yesterday and got the finance manager on the phone.

“I have a question I hope you can help me with,” I said with a smile, “Because I believe a mistake has been made with regard to the return of my security deposit. You see, the Wear and Tear Addendum to the lease I signed specifies fees for ‘cleaning as needed’ beyond normal wear and tear. What cleaning was needed?”

“Oh, that’s just a standard fee,” she started to say. I let her go on, this time without interrupting her.

“The lease doesn’t allow for a standard fee. It says, ‘as needed’. Could you please document the cleaning that was needed? And if no special cleaning was needed, could you please return the balance of my deposit?”

She offered to look into it and call me back.

“I asked my manager about this,” she said, “We can waive half the fee. We always hire professional cleaners when a tenant moves out, and we have to pay them.”

“I appreciate the consideration you’ve extended me,” I said, making myself smile. “At the same time, it’s not my concern what your company chooses to spend money on after I move out. I am not in the position to be so generous as to allow your company to keep $82.50 of my money. Again, I would greatly appreciate it if you would return the full amount. Otherwise, I may find myself obliged to find alternative means to recover my money, which would undoubtedly prove to be a massive waste of your time, and I’m sure neither of us really wants that.”

The poor lady is just working a job for an employer that probably sucks, guessing from how they’re grifting their tenants. She might’ve been in the wrong, but she didn’t deserve abuse from me. As usual the folks who really deserve the abuse have carefully made themselves unavailable.

I was very proud of myself. I didn’t raise my voice, I was polite the entire time, and I didn’t use the words lawyer or court. The finance manager asked if she could put me on hold, and not five minutes later, she was back promising to “waive the entire cleaning fee”.

We’ll see about that when the check arrives. But… Look, Ma, Schuyler might be growing up after all.

I had another such experience today. The weather forecast predicted a high of 105ºF, which is just about 40ºC. I went out before starting work to do a bunch of yard work, which I wanted to get out of the way before I leave Portland for a couple weeks. One of the tasks Besha asked me to look to was cleaning up the curb strip on the north side of the house, along the fence where, for whatever reason, the locals like to toss litter on occasion.

I’ll just post screenshots of the exchange, which you can read if you like. I tried not to use a harsh tone, and I kept the profanity in my heart out of the messages I wrote. I knew I was probably punching down at someone less privileged than me.

But I’m also not interested in putting up with other people’s bullshit, less privileged or not. (I admit that I may jumped to a conclusion about the language spoken by the litterbug, because when people park on that corner, they often blast Norteño music.)

I think I managed this one okay. David finally shut up and stopped replying. I’m fine with that. Hopefully he’ll also think twice about making me clean up his garbage again. In any event, I didn’t lose my shit, which is more important to me than having to clean up some asshat’s litter.

Thank you, Andy, wherever you are, for pushing me to try better.

To you who are reading this still, I send my love. I realize the subject of this journal entry is kinda childish for a 46 year old man, but I’m at where I’m at. Thanks for once again making it to the end of an entry that’s twice as long as it was meant to be. I realize I intended to be cranking these out daily and these days I’m managing one every two or four weeks. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est.

Also, I had to go back and fix my last post, because Adah pointed out that I had totally glossed over the fact that Mom had, in fact, provided any instructions about her headstone — Adah had to drag them out of her, at a meaningful emotional cost, while I was busy hiking in the Alps. More about that later, though.