Entitlement

The mess still blocking the Mesa house's driveway on June 20, 2018.

Last week, on Wednesday and Thursday, Mark and I drove down to Mesa again. Mark had some business there on Wednesday, and I wanted to make a little more progress on the house we inherited while we were there. Especially, I wanted to clear out the mess of dumped furniture left behind by the former "tenants" when we'd evicted them three weeks earlier.

Unfortunately, we didn't make as much progress as I'd intended. For one thing, Jacob worked both days we were there (his days off being Friday and Saturday), and since he's gone from about 9:00 in the morning to 7:00 in the evening, there wasn't much opportunity to involve him in our plans. For another, we ran into interference from the former "tenants."

I rented this U-Haul truck on Wednesday to haul away the junk.

The five adults who'd been living rent-free in this house for the past six years were finally evicted on Thursday, May 31st. By law, I could not dispose of the possessions they left behind until twenty-one days had passed. Those twenty-one days ended on Thursday, June 21st. Thus, I rented a truck on Wednesday so I could haul away their stuff--which we'd cleared out of the house and piled in front of the garage--on Thursday, as soon as I could legally do so. 

Although I'll have to rent a roll-off dumpster (for about $300) to clear the rest of the property (the trash heaped throughout the garage, side-yard, and backyard being pretty much indescribable), I figured we could at least clear the space in the driveway with just two loads to the dump. Since we'd already hauled away about two-thirds of the rubbish they'd left in the house, which truly was damaged too badly to be of use or was just-plain-old-garbage, the stack in the driveway wasn't quite as enormous as it could have been.

My plan would have worked, too, except...

Jacob and Mark get more than half the pile loaded onto the truck.

When Jacob got home on Wednesday, we went to Boston Market for dinner and then went back to the house so Jacob and Mark could load the truck with as much stuff as possible. They got all three rickety dressers on board, although each one fell apart a little more in the process, plus two twin mattresses, a broken television, several bags of various smaller kitchen/bathroom/bedroom items, and about half the ratty old books we'd found. (I admit, it does go against the grain for me to throw away books...)

It was after 10:00 when we went back inside, where we wrestled to install an uncooperative new garbage disposal in the kitchen (the old one sounded like it was grinding rocks). About half an hour later, my twenty-year-old nephew Julien arrived and helped us get the disposal locked into place. Julien and his dog, Porsche, a beautiful red and white pit bull, moved in on Monday to become Jacob's new roommates. On this particular night, though, Julien collected a few things and left sometime after 11:30 to spend the night at the home of his girlfriend's family, giving up his bed to Mark.

No sooner had Julien left than there was a loud knock at the door. Keep in mind that it's now nearly midnight. It was one of the former tenants, who'd been informed that we were loading up their things. He claimed that we hadn't waited the full twenty-one days, falsely stating that the eviction was signed by the constable on June 5th. He even admitted that he had been taking pictures of the load on the truck to prove that we were taking their property away illegally.

In an instant, I went from trying-to-be-nice mode to full-on you-don't-want-to-play-that-game-with-me mode. I told him in no uncertain terms that the constable signed the eviction on May 31st and offered to show it to him. Make no mistake, tomorrow will be twenty-one days, I said. Strangely enough, he didn't seem interested in seeing the documentation. Then I told him firmly that I'd paid for the rental truck and it was going to haul something away tomorrow. 

I gave him until 11:00 the next morning to take the stuff he wanted off the truck and anything else from the garage or yard. "Believe me," I assured him, "it's not like I don't want you to come and get your stuff. Everything you take is something I don't have to pay to haul off myself. But this stuff has to go so we can do what we need to do to make repairs, so we aren't waiting anymore." 

We talked outside with him for close to an hour. He explained how he and their group were living in a single hotel room because they couldn't qualify for housing, since only one of them has a job. I am sympathetic to their situation, but... Putting aside the fact that they told me back in April that they all had jobs and could pay me $700 in monthly rent if I let them stay (simply a delay tactic, I now see), one has to wonder why only one of five able-bodied adults can find a job. 

The answer has become clear over the past several weeks: drugs and the attendant sense of entitlement. Why find a job when you feel entitled to having other people take care of your needs, while you pursue your addictions? In six years, they not only paid no rent, but also allowed the house to fall into disrepair and filth and roach infestation, while loading it up with more and more hoarded garbage. And now, having been deprived of their free lodgings, they can't understand why I shouldn't provide them with free storage for as long as they wish.

All loaded up and ready to go on Thursday morning.

On Thursday morning, which happened to be Mark's 50th birthday, he and I went to breakfast at Denny's before doing some shopping at Walmart and Home Depot (plumbing supplies this time). It was exactly 11:37 when we pulled up at the house to find this guy again hovering around the loaded truck. There was a note under the windshield wiper, which I didn't read until after he left.

He insisted that he had a friend coming with a truck to take away their stuff, if we'd just wait an hour or two. I told him if the truck wasn't there by 1:00, we were leaving for the landfill. I hated to wait so long, since the truck had to be returned at 4:00, but I felt I had no choice. So far, all the former tenants' promises had been empty, but just in case they were serious this time... Plus, the constable had signed the paper at 1:30 p.m. on May 31st, so I supposed that I couldn't technically consider the twenty-one days complete until 1:30.

So, Mark and I waited...and waited...and waited. At 1:15, Mark went out to secure the load with the ratchet-tie-downs we'd bought. Meanwhile, I made a short video as evidence that we'd waited the full twenty-one days, right down to 1:30, before we took away their now-abandoned property. In fact, it was 1:40 when we drove away from the house. I will post the video to my Facebook page. Kind of amusing, now.

Unfortunately, with the late start, we ran out of time to load up and haul off the rest of the junk in the driveway. There wasn't that much left. Just two larger mattresses, a torn-up love seat, a bin filled with magazines (many featuring sex and drug themes), two small mirror-topped tables, the other half of the ratty book collection, and more bags. With an extra half-hour, we could have done it. It was disappointing, but we called it quits and cleaned up the remaining piles the best we could. Two days later, a man driving by stopped and asked Julien if he might take the old, roach-infested appliances away (to sell for scrap-metal, I'm sure), and Julien said he could. So I'm sure the mess is somewhat less annoying to the neighbors now than it was previously.

When we left Mesa on Thursday evening, the disposal was installed

but the plumbing still needed to be worked out.

Jacob drove up to Lakeside with us, in his own car, on Thursday night so he could enjoy his days off with family. We spent that time celebrating Mark's birthday, as well as  Jacob's and Dylan's upcoming birthdays, but that's a matter for a later post. The reality of all the work ahead to restore the Mesa house gets quite overwhelming at times, so his visit gave us a much-needed break to just be together and relax.

We will press on. And we won't be distracted by empty promises and delay tactics anymore!