Worth losing your bond for....

Landlords are the single most loathable group of people on this earth, next to four-wheel drive and gun owners. If you’re not in a car or walking around in a game park or somewhere in South Central you can usually manage to avoid the last two, but landlords are the reason most of us jump when the work whip cracks. Not only can we not avoid them, we haul our sorry arses out of bed each morning to work for them. Some landlords manage to have whole apartment blocks, nay, whole suburbs of worker bees keeping them in convertible beamers. When I was a student living in a seven person shit-hole, my landlord would squeal up outside in one of his fleet of fancy cars like he owned the place and produce a string of keys as long as a skipping rope. He did own the place… the suburb that is. Each key represented a prime piece of Carlton real estate. But before I get lost in the polemic of how nobody needs to own more than two properties (which I seriously believe, by the way) I’ll tell you about Snowy. For this is the purpose of my post… and the punchline has a parental advisory, so all those relatives and language-sensitive readers of mine (oh the hordes!) might need to avert their eyes.

Chris and his housemate have just moved out of Snowy’s block. We first encountered this snivelling little man in the unfortunate flesh when I unwittingly parked in his car space. Before the engine was cold he was at the front door, nervously informing us that he was ‘a very busy man’ and my car was in the way. At that stage we didn’t know who he was – not that it would have made a blind bit of difference had we known. I don’t grovel to people simply because they’ve managed to live off the fat of other people’s labours and have got land titles to prove it. Snowy wasn’t to know this, and on his second angry visit (again about carparking in the block), he announced ‘I own this block!’.

When you pay rent, you score yourself the ‘unalienable right to enjoy the property without hindrance (or something – perhaps law grads less rusty than myself can enlighten me about the exact phrasing of that piece of property law)’. Having the landlord’s son (yep, it turned out that Daddy Snowy owned the block – not his useless son) rapping on the door all red-faced and spluttery and stuttery and nervous because he wants to assert his rank, doesn’t impress me at all. That ‘his’ flat was plagued with problems (lack of basic plumbing for starters) he never bothered to fix was even less impressive. Laughably, the affluent little nerd would get about in a Sex Pistols tee-shirt, which hung uneasily above chinos and sensible shoes. “Yeah, rock on”, Chrissy heckled one day when we spied him in it, as Snowy flushed with embarrassment.

Worst of all was that we’d hear the ‘Very Busy Man’ actually, er, getting busy. Snowy seemed to be slumming it in Daddy’s block with the junkie-looking tripper who lived in the apartment above Chris’s, and he was rather anaemically ‘seeing to her’ (as he’d probably put it) of a morning. It was around this time Chris started bashing on his ceiling every time the hollow, boringly rhythmic bed creak would start up. She probably silently thanked us as the angry little weazel rolled off her and skulked into the bathroom to sook about it.

Anyway, when Chris and Shaun moved out they painted all the doors, steam-cleaned the carpets – did all the usual stuff tenants do to get their bonds back. But they forgot one thing. Chris told me last night they’d received a notice to remove ‘obscene graffitti’ in the house. I remembered and laughed out loud – Chris had written “P Snowden is a small dicked, ugly cunt" on the window sill. And he'd forgotten to scrub it off!