Don't expect an answer to the question. It's the question I'm pondering on because things can get frustrating at times. Like it did with my landlady just about yesterday, and it brought up other bad memories. This is just my dose of copium.
Jokingly sometimes people tell me that if you can come out of a relationship with a narcissist and dating in Tokyo and London, you're pretty much capable of dealing with anything.
Yet, sometimes I get that moment where I am just thinking, "Can't people give me a f*cking break from their bullshit at times"? Then it is pretty much:
Don't get me wrong. I do not have a therapist. As one of my not-so-traumatic London dates once told me, I could probably benefit from one. That sounds weird. He didn't say it in that way, more in a "having a therapist has helped me." way.
And to be fair, he had a healthy amount of confidence and the decency to ask before trying to get too close for me (read kissing me), giving me the chance to reject his advances kindly—1 point for therapy. This is pretty uncommon, explaining the men will do anything instead of going to therapy meme.
So since I don't have a therapist, I have to be my own therapist whenever shit happens. Usually, my therapy is three-fold. It consists of:
- Memes
- Wine
- Writing
Recently, I quite like Pepe memes.
The wine I am drinking already. That brings us to the third point of writing. It helps me work through stuff and put my mind at ease.
What happened?
In short, renting in London. I thought dating was terrible here, but renting is worse.
To put that into perspective, I've been doing this fun online dating business in Tokyo as well. My highlights during that time were once a guy who was definitely 15 years older and 15 kg heavier than advertised (I managed to sneak away), and once I ended up at an MLM introduction meeting. At least those are fun anecdotes to tell people.
“Once upon a time, I went on a Tinder date in Tokyo, and ended up in an indoctrination session for supplements that would change your life. If you managed to sign-up another 10 of your friends. The guy I was with had said we were going to grab a coffee. I am still angry about not even getting a coffee despite sitting through 3 hours of brainwashing. ”
I forgot the name of the supplements and the guy, but it was still a memorable experience. Even more so because I was the only one not 100% Japanese in that room. Be careful; sometimes, they just want you for their commission.
It's somewhat not very harmful to have had these experiences. Looking back, it was mostly entertaining.
If I do some mental accounting of dating in London, I had a Doctor with PTSD, a guy who ghosted me, just to then come back and beg me to give him another chance just to then ghost me again…And then, magically reappear on New Year's Eve with a "Happy New Year" Message. You will be glad to know that I've been blatantly ignoring him this time.
There was also this guy who had no understanding of the concept of consent and another whose jealousy was only beaten by his weird germophobia.
Unfortunately, these are a lot less entertaining anecdotes. I'd actually be positively surprised if someone dragged me to a Tupperware MLM meeting on a first date by now.
And then there's renting here.
Sublet…what?!
Thanks to living in London, I now know what a sublet scam is. Not because I had been running one. I wish.
The first place I was living at in London was run by an agency. And everything seemed fine until it didn't. My other flatmates went back to their home countries when the pandemic hit. All of them were refunded their deposit.
When I gave them my notice a few months later, I received a message that they couldn't refund me the entire deposit because they had CashFlow issues. However, as a gesture of goodwill, they could send me half now, and another half later.
That message had me like
German as I am, I told them that this was unacceptable. Cashflow issues are their problem, but my deposit should have never been part of their cash flow in the first place. It's to be put in an account where it earns interest and to be returned in full to the tenant upon moving out.
That didn't go down well with them. The last message I ever got was something along the lines of "Okay since you are not willing to understand our situation, screw you. You will never see a cent. Try to sue us if you wish."
I called citizens advice and eventually figured out that the agency was definitely doing some shady shit. It turned out, that they had rented that house from a private landlord, and then rented it to other people without letting the original landlord know. That's a sublet scam.
Of course, as an agency with such a loose understanding of what's legal, they didn't bother registering the place as housing in multiple occupation either — which apparently you really have to do because that's the law here. If you fail to comply you can get in some serious trouble. In case you were considering running a sublet scam, don't.
After some more digging, I even had a journalist reach out to me who wanted to look into the agency. But as things had it, they had dissolved their office and were nowhere to be found. All that was left was a dysfunctional website and me who lost another chunk of money to bad actors. I looked into pursuing them legally but quickly figured that that would be a lot more expensive than the value of the deposit. Another expensive lesson was learned.
A heartless landlady
I shall lovingly (or do we say hatingly) title her that. According to Wilhelm Stekel, the opposite of love is indifference, but I have not yet reached the point with that landlady that I currently have.
At first, everything was alright. But then one of the housemates moved out, and she found a quick replacement. Which turned out to be a nightmare.
You'd think that common sense is to at least ask the current tenants, do basic due diligence on anyone moving in. But nah, that was way beyond her immature horizon.
Whenever she wanted something from us, it had to be immediate. Whenever our boiler broke (in winter) or other things were off, we had to plead for weeks to get any kind of action.
Btw, as someone from a country where we are obsessed with separating trash, I also took offense when she told other housemates that they could just put recycling into the normal bin. 👿
One of the negative highlights was definitely the one girl she had move in who turned out to be a crazy b*tch. I don't say this lightly. But when someone has zero respect for anyone or anything, is self-centered af, and ignorant beyond imagination then, it's justified. At the height of living with her, we once called the police because she started throwing her cooking pots at us, and threatened to "Kill us". We could consider ourselves lucky that there was no knife in reachable distance.
I didn't know where the Japanese manga artist got their inspirations for Demons from, but they might have looked at her facial expression that day. It was beyond reason.
In case you wonder what on earth could trigger such a reaction…It was having moved one of her cooking utensils so we could clean.
The police of course suggested we should call the landlady. She had very little understanding and would just go on telling us how grateful we should be that she had come, she even canceled a dinner for this.
Oh yes, mam, so grateful for you coming to tell us to be grateful for you coming in a situation where your first thought maybe should not have been "what an ungrateful bunch." (In case it is not obvious, this is very sarcastic)
After the police literally told us that we should go out of each others' way, and if any other violent conflicts (well the only violent one had been the pot-thrower) emerged, we should call again — the landlady had the fun idea that we should all go sit together and talk.
When even herself, she had previously told us she thought that the pot thrower was crazy, and she couldn't tell her to use her electric heater more responsibly, because she was afraid that she'd get it thrown at her.
The hypocrisy.
A broken boiler, and many other small incidents that had just proven that all she cared about was money later…finally the pot-throwing housemate moved out and we thought we would have some peace.
WRONG.
She handed us our notice because she wanted to get rid of the house asap. One does have to wonder why. Maybe she herself has also failed to register it as housing in multiple occupations.
I mean giving notice is in her right. But what isn't is terrorizing us over it. She sent it to us yesterday, and she has been on our case ever since to give her a response. She even went as far as questioning why we'd not give her a response sooner suggesting that "we might be seeking legal counsel.". And even if, it'd be well in our right to do so.
She's been bombarding us with messages and calls. Unfortunately, my other housemate accepted her call and ended up venting to me. When my housemate told her that she had been ill, her only response was ignoring that and asking, if she was going to seek legal advice, or why it was taking her so long.
Is it so unreasonable to expect some decency from a landlord? Give people at least three days if not a week to give a response to when they will move out? It seems that she already has an army of agents lined up to look at the place and we're supposed to be accommodating all of this.
She seems not to have any understanding of the fact that working from home sure as hell for some does mean WORKING. Not leisurely chilling around, ready to welcome random strangers to look at a place (which btw you have no benefit of doing outside of doing her a favor).
I've been living here since August, and in that short amount of time, her behavior and lack of basic empathy have been so annoying (and sometimes as in the case with a broken boiler, chilling) that I ended up writing this post. Quite a negative accomplishment.
Is it so hard for people to be a little generous?
This brings me back to the question I started with. Will Karma ever catch up?
I don't think I ask for much when I expect a little common sense and empathy from people.
Those just trying to maximize for money usually end up hurting a lot of souls along the way. But will they ever actually realize that?
Personally, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and maximize for being kind — at the expense of my own patience. Also because I think vengeance is probably a shitty path to go down.
And what would it look like anyway? Trashing the place? No, I'd never do that.
Latest since watching Death Note, I come to realize that trying to eradicate bad is probably a slippery slope and so is vengeance. In case you haven't seen it, it's about a teenager who finds a "Death Note", a book that's normally owned by a Death God. Anyone whose name is written into that book dies.
With noble intentions, the teenager named Light (ironic) who fans soon start calling Kira, sets out to eradicate all evil from the world by killing criminals. Eventually, though, the lines get blurry and he starts killing all those who get in the way of his mission. Anyway, no more spoilers, just go and watch it. The original, not the weird Netflix adoption of it.
Will my landlady, or those guys who ran the sublet scam ever wake up to realize the damage they had done? Maybe. Maybe not.
But what a life is that if all you care about is just the money, at the expense of human relationships. For me, I'll stick to my three-fold therapy approach whenever I come across one of those bad actors. I won't hold a grudge, because frankly if it's not worth worrying about in 5 years, why should I spend 5 days on it now.
In that case, it also doesn't really matter if Karma catches up or not.
If you come into such a situation where you are really tempted to take revenge or just "pay someone back", it might be better to not.
All that being said, if you're building a glassdoor for landlords, you have my full support.
