Dear Hamilton Court:
I am publishing this letter so that future tenants might know full well what they are getting into. As a tenant, I believe that I am very reasonable -- I put up with a lot of inconvenience, mainly because I'm too lazy to complain about it or actually attempt to change it. But, at this point, I've just about had it.
I really didn't mind the fire alarm testing, although it was evident that it worked fairly well when it went off by accident at 10 in the morning. I did appreciate your "testing" it all the next week, including drilling a hole into my room (also around 10 a.m.) to connect the hall fire alarm to my room to make it even louder before testing it yet again! I have never seen such a zealous compliance with the fire and safety codes. All I can say is it's a good thing I didn't have a test that morning. Oh wait, I did!
It didn't bother me either that Hotwire, the cable/Internet provider, is the shadiest company ever. I mean, it's true I didn't have Internet for the first three weeks of school, but then again, no one else did either, right? My favorite thing about Hotwire was the old tell 'em the first month's free, bill 'em for it anyway, then tell 'em "oops, we meant the OTHER building -- our bad" bait and switcheroo. It's the oldest one in the book!
Although, come to think of it, my favorite thing about Hotwire might have been the weeks it took them to come and fix my Internet after it went down. Or how it just sometimes goes down for darns and giggles. What fun!
I also like how my cable has trouble getting ABC and Fox because it mixes the local station numbers with what they are on the different cable lineup into one nice, grainy, fuzzy image. As a giant football fan, I can safely say that I have no use for either of those stations. It's a good thing you guys picked my cable company for me.
I'll tell you what -- I did have my mother look over my lease with her sharp lawyer's eye and give me her professional opinion. Lucky for me, I totally ignored how she almost fainted at the clause in it that says that you can basically come into my apartment whenever you want under any circumstances at any time of the day to "show" the room, or really, just for fun.
I also didn't mind that the elevator sometimes just doesn't work, or the helpful "out of order" signs you put up on it to fix it. Taking the stairs is healthy and fun! In truth, however, even when the elevator does work, it's a really liberal interpretation of the word "work." But that's neither here nor there!
Although, my dearly beloved, I have to say, it was probably the roof fiasco that alienated most of your tenants. It's a rather long saga, so I will have to omit some details.
I am a strong supporter of the maintenance on the roof (according to one construction worker, it was "coming close to sliding off the side of the building. How old is this thing again?"). But boy, could you guys use some PR management. (Speaking of PR management, you know those helpful signs you put up informing us of impending inconveniences? You know your cute, helpful slogan at the bottom that reads, "When you rent an apartment, you also rent the landlord?" Come to think of it, that slogan is neither cute nor helpful; in fact, it suggests a near-sadistic glee. Maybe you should look into changing that.)
Anyways, I didn't mind the fact that you put caution tape around the front entrance and made people go around the back, or sometimes vice versa, depending on what the tea leaves read. I understand that -- we want to avoid falling bits of roof. I even complied with the instruction to walk several feet away from the caution tape, because that meant walking in a much safer area -- the middle of the street!
But when you close off BOTH the front AND back entrances in the morning, when I've allocated exactly 15 minutes to get to class, and I have to at that point figure out that to get out, I must proceed through the "A" building from the courtyard through a basement and out a side door which puts me smack dab on 38th and Chestnut (the center of campus), well, that requires a little too much thinking for the morning.
However, the defining moment of the roof saga came when the incessant pounding from construction woke me up at 9 o'clock on Sunday morning and made it darn well certain that I wasn't going back to sleep. That was just about 40 minutes ago.
Yeah. That really pissed me off.
P.S. Anyone interested in subletting this summer, contact me as soon as possible. Living in Hamilton Court is great!
Eliot Sherman is a junor English major from Philadelphia, Pa.
