From about a year ago to some time next week, I’ve been living in a townhouse with a couple of awesome, horrible, roommates, in Laurel. It’s in a big community called Russett, just across 198 from 295. The location is awesome, and the units are great. Big bright windows, modern kitchens, and I’ve never heard any noise from any of the neighbors. Well worth the money. But I’m very glad I’m moving out soon.

More after the jump, but suffice it to say that the new management company, Archstone-Smith, are a pack of chucklefuck retards that I’d be happy to see out of business and bankrupt.

I’ve always had problems with the way people drive around here. There have been no less than 4 accidents in the past year between here and 198, less than a mile away. People try to turn left out of the Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club and get stuck, then rammed. Or they just don’t pay attention and ram someone else. Or they try to rush through the Russett Green/198 intersection, because it’s green for about 20 seconds in any direction unless you’re trying to go straight on 198, in which case it stays green for 2 minutes. Comcast/BGE/moving trucks/random jerks tend to park across my driveway, and because we’re on the end of the street next to the dumpsters, with no room to turn around, the only thing I can do is get progressively more belligerent every time they do it.

Last week, Matt was coming home, down the entrance to our community, and the car in front of him stopped in the middle of the street. Then started backing up. He honked, and she backed right into him. Her reaction, when she got out of the car? “Why did you wait to honk?”. Yeah.

Hopefully she’s the exception rather than the rule, but what the hell? Why did she stop? And back up? And get indignant because she didn’t look behind her when backing up and hit a damn car?

Anyway, management recently switched over from Oakwood to Archstone-Smith, and where the former were unobtrusive, the latter are a pack of clowns. The first notice we got that management was changing was the new, uglier, sign out front. Then they decided, for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, that the rental office wasn’t going to be open on weekends anymore. At all. Saturday or Sunday, it used to be open 9-6, and now it’s not open at all. They are basically requiring people with “real” jobs to take time off work to go househunting, and that is, bluntly put, completely fucking retarded. If I’d been looking for an apartment here and seen that, I would’ve kept right on looking and never looked back. This is an expensive community - they offered to renew our lease on a three-bedroom townhouse for another year at $1800/month - and the vast majority of the people who can afford to live here are going to be at work Monday to Friday.

What convinced me that we made the right choice in moving, though, was that we got a letter the other day about the parking situation here. Starting June 1st, they’re going to start using a new towing company, who are actually going to start towing cars without parking passes.

A bit about the parking here: There are the townhomes, like ours, where you get a one-car garage and a parking spot in the driveway, and there are apartements, with a big communal lot. Anyone in the apartments, or overflow from the townhouses (like us - 3 cars, two private spots), ponies up for a parking pass to use the lot. Visitors have to go to the rental office and get a temporary pass. No pass, and they tow your car. But you can just go grab a bunch of them, or if you’re us, you grab one and photocopy it. I’ve never seen a tow truck here, anyway. The lot is never more than half full, but why they don’t just have reserved Resident and Visitor spots is completely beyond me. It’s a minor hassle, at best.

The problem with their new plan is that one-day visitor passes will now cost $3 (checks only, no cash), and are only valid the day you buy them.

So, you have to pick them up the day you use them, and they’re only good for one day, and the rental office is closed on weekends. Every time you have a visitor, someone has to be home that day, during business hours (9-6, Monday through Friday), to get a visitor pass for them. You cannot, under any circumstances, have uninvited, or even unplanned, guests over, unless it’s during those hours. When you’re probably at work. Words fail me on describing just how staggeringly fucking stupid you’d have to be to think that this was a good idea.

In case you weren’t paying attention, that means that it is effectively impossible to have people come over on weekends, unless you want to shuttle them to and from the nearest shopping center parking lot, where they might still get towed.

I’m sure the new towing company is happy about this arrangement, but the residents are angry enough that less than a day after we got the letter from management, everyone in the community had another letter stuffed under their door. This was from “A DISGRUNTLED RESIDENT”, saying about what I’m saying here. This made him mad enough that in less than a day he wrote a page-long response, made 50 copies, and stuck one to every door in the place. I don’t normally side with crotchety letter-writing wackos, but A DISGRUNTLED RESIDENT is starting to sound really reasonable.

This is insane. It’s a fairly blatant cash grab from a no-class company that I’m already paying a lot of money. I have never, never lived in a place that tried to pull this nickel-and-dime shit. I’ve never even heard of a place trying to do this. Just to reiterate, parking has never been a problem here at all. Ask Matt, who deals with it every day. There are dozens of spots open all the time, so explain to me why it was necessary to buckle down on parking to absurd levels? Because the $21 a day or so to be made from this idiotic scheme is really going to matter?

So, fuckfaces, I’m moving out next weekend. I hope this unit, and all the others, stay vacant for as long as it takes for you to end up penniless in a gutter, with a fucking rat gnawing on your windpipe. Go to hell.