Ode to Murphy's Wood Oil

In continuing my breakdown of her inability to clean I recall that she began using Murphy's Wood Oil Soap on the floor. The instructions on how to use it go like this:

http://www.ehow.com/how_6159014_use-oil-soap-wood-floors.html
Instructions

1. • 1
     Pour ¼ cup of Murphy Oil Soap into a bucket. Add 1 gallon of warm water.
   • 2
     Stir the contents with a long-handled brush. Stir until the soap mixes well with the water and becomes sudsy.
   • 3
     Place a clean mop into the soap mixture. Gently wring the mop out to make it damp.
   • 4
     Apply a small amount of pressure when mopping the wood floor. Continue to dip the mop into the bucket and wring out the solution once the mop does not appear as damp as before.
   • 5
     Dry the floor off with a clean towel.

     
     

     Here is how my land lady uses the product:

     1) Pour on the floor

     2)Leave it.

     
     

     We first discovered that she may not be using it right when my roommate and I came home at the same time. My roommate ,who just got home from work wearing dress shoes, slide across the floor in a speed unobtainable to an unaided man. I am pretty sure I saw sparks. I, in my sneakers, suffered a similar fate. I had on sneakers, whose only purpose is to keep traction as I run. They proved to have no power over the wood soap. My feet slipped beneath me and I was up in the air...all +200lbs of me. As I hovered in the air, reaching a hang time that Michael Jordan would be jealous of, I was at peace. I had slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. Time and Space had no meaning. However my enemy would not let me got that quickly and gravity once again took hold. I hit the ground with a spat and continues to slide across the floor for several minutes.

     I asked my roommate if he had some sort of metaphysical experience as he slide. He said he heard "Space Oddity" by David Bowe

     The oiling of the floor continued for several months. We began to notice that the floor began to warp and some of the wood panels began to separate. We attributed to her care of the floor or lack of. We brought it to the attention of boss of bosses...they guy who runs this housing thing. He thought it was caused by a fault in the builders. Yeah he isn't too bright himself. When the floor is ruined and he has to pay for it to be replaced he will think about this conversation.

     One day, in a fit of rage, one of the roommates told her to stop using the wood oil on the floor.

     Footnote: One of my roommates is looking for a job. Our land lady told him he needs to act more Mexican. It was an odd statement because he is black and she is brazilian. She said mexicans will take any job regardless if they know what they are doing. 

     "I took this job and have never cleaned a house before in my life." She said.

     Yeah we know.

     
     

     
     

Cleanliness is Close to Dumbliness

The madness continues....

The biggest issue people have with our land lady is her method of cleaning. Now to clarify we aren't a bunch of dirty people. We clean after ourselves and she comes in to do a deeper cleaning. One day out of the week she cleans the bathroom, living room and kitchen. The day she chose was Sunday morning. Imagine that someone comes into your home Sunday at 8am to clean your bathroom. Sunday is everyone's day to sleep in. Even God sleeps in on Sunday and wakes up to hot wings and football.
Her primary weapons in the war on dirt is bleach and ammonia.

For those who don't know:

Household bleach has a chemical formula of NaOCl - that is, one atom each of sodium, oxygen, and chlorine. Its chemical name, for the curious, is sodium hypochlorite. Ammonia has a chemical formula of NH3, that is, one atom of nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen. When these two compounds are combined, the following reaction takes place:

2(parts)NaOCl + 2NH3 --> 2NaONH3 + Cl2.

Do you see that Cl2 on the right hand side there? This means one part chlorine gas, made up of diatomic (two atom) molecules. It also means that the chlorine gas has been liberated from the bleach, and is quite capable of causing you harm when inhaled!

An average Sunday morning involves me and the roommates waking up and having to open all the windows and/or leaving the house. How she manages to stay in that bathroom and clean is beyond me. I went out and bought Scrub Free Clean Shower. It's a product you spray on the shower that cleans it without the harsh chemicals. When she saw the spray she asked who bought it. I said I did. I told her that it is better to use as it doesn't try to kill everyone in the house.

"How does it disinfect?"

"It's chemicals." I said.

"But the chemical smell disinfects......."

She said other things but I didn't hear them. The human body has various inner safe guards to prevent damage. We sweat when we get hot to prevent overheating. I think our brains turn off when a we hear something so stupid it to continue to hear it would give you an aneurysm. My brain gave me the 'deuces ' sign and punched out like Maverick in Top Gun. 

Lord Of The Flies

It hasn't all been bad times at the compound. I actually play a game with her called "Close the Door". The game goes like this: The enters our house and doesn't close the door behind her. After a few minutes I have to close the door behind her. Now I am not talking about leaving the door a little ajar. She leaves the door wide open, letting flies and other creepy crawlers the opportunity to enter our home.

Flies are the main thing. I hate flies. They buzz about and no food or drink are safe from them landing on it. The house that she lives in is full of flies. They leave the door wide open. I am pretty sure the door is wide open now. Wait here, I'll go check. Yup wide open. I went to the other house last week to use their bathroom and there was a cluster of flies buzzing about their house. She can't figure out why they have so many flies in the house. Her research into fly habits has led her to believe the reason they have so many flies in the house.....is because of the tree in the back yard.

We had (operative word is had) a nice, majestic tree in out back yard. It was some sort of berry tree. If I had to guess maybe black berries. Now when you have a fruit tree of any kind and you don't tend to it the fruit grows, dies and falls on the ground. The rotting fruit attracts flies. Our backyard was full of flies. Every once and a while she'd rake up the dead fruit but she didn't do it regular enough. She decided that a more drastic measure needed to be taken. A handyman was hired and in one day the tree went from majestic tree to piece of wood sticking out of the ground. Every branch was cut from the tree. The once shady area we had in the backyard is now gone. It's as if a guy decides he doesn't want anymore kids and cuts his dick off as a result.

However she continues to leave the door open and still can't figure out why their house has so many flies in it. Yesterday while washing dishes I look into the back yard and see her trying to pull up a bush that is by their door out of the ground by hand. No tools. No knife or hedge clippers. Just using her hands. She may have been trying to push the house for the results she was getting. After thirty minutes of pulling she decides to break off the branches. There are now four sharp pieces of wood sticking out of the ground where a nice little bush was present.

So I know a lot of people think I am making this all up so I've included photographic evidence.

The remains of the Bush.

Door still wide open.

Sad tree.

911 Is A Joke

The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the stupid...

After the pizza-drug deal it seems her dumb-ness lay dormant. We were relieved and thought the worst was over. Oh how we were wrong.
This summer, summer of 2013, we began to experience blackouts in the neighborhood. It seemed natural to me since the temperature reached 110 and everyone had their air conditioning on and thats a lot of drain on the power company. The first time we had one everything went out. Street lights, traffic lights...everything. (REDACTED), the land lady grabbed her cell phone and called 911.
911.
The Emergency hotline for police, fire and ambulance.
I can't even begin to fathom how that conversation went.
"911, whats your emergency?"
"The power is out."
"Um...say again."
"The power went out on the block."
"911 is only for emergencies."
"This is an emergency. Our power is out."
"Please call your power company not 911."

This conversation dragged on for a few more minutes. In that time people with real emergencies like dying, house on fire or wearing a LA Clippers jersey couldn't get the help they needed. Now if the story stopped there you'd think I just told you a funny story about how messed up my land lady is. However the story doesn't end there...it get worst.

On our property is two houses. One house for the men the other house for the women. Now a group of women had moved into the house and decided that their first act of being in Los Angeles was to go to Universal Studios. Since no one had a car they decided to take the city's fine public transportation. You may not no it but i was being sarcastic. Public Transit here runs on a 'we'll get there when we get there' attitude. However I digress, the landlady decided she wanted to go with them. To get to Universal from here you catch a bus to the train and the train takes you to Universal. So they catch a bus and arrive at the train station. At the train station one of the roommates, we'll call her Pam, had a seizure.
How did the land lady respond?
She decided to bring Pam home.
At home Pam decided to have another seizure. The land lady calls....the housing company's front office. She talks to her boss, we'll call her Marsha. (REDACTED) calls Marsha and asks her to call 911 for Pam.
Marsha asks why (REDACTED) doesn't call 911. (REDACTED) tells Marsha that whomever calls 911 is responsible for the medical bills and she doesn't have that kind of money. Go back and read that sentence, I'll wait. Read it again. Let the words sink into your soul. Eventually an ambulance was called and Pam got the help she needed.
At this point I was furious with (REDACTED) and the main office. This woman was insane. If I was home alone and needed help and she was my only hope...I would die. At this point I put myself on a aspirin regiment because if I ever had a heart attack that would be a wrap. I was mad at the front office because they now know that she is incompetent and had anything happened to Pam her family could have sued. This woman is responsible for my well being and she is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Unfortunately this was the start of the spiral into unconditional stupidity.

Coming up next "Ode to Murphy's Wood Oil"

Dime Bag of Pepperoni

The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the stupid...

After a few months of having a new land lady, things began to settle down. We didn't see the early warning signs of stupidity. We go to her if the cable was out. She'd call Time Warner. The cable would come back on. She'd walk into the room with the TV on and ask if the cable was working. Mind you there is nothing else hooked to the TV...not a PS3, XBOX or DVD player. However things took a turn for the worst one day.

Two roommates, we'll call them Jim and John, were hungry and decided to order a pizza together. Jim doesn't have any cash on him so John agrees to pay for it as long as Jim pays him back. The two enjoy a pizza from one of the superb pizzerias we have in the area. Honestly there is some good pizza around here...but that is neither here nor there.
The next day Jim comes home on his school lunch break to give John his money. On the front lawn Jim hands John a few dollars...all in plain view of (REDACTED), the land lady. Jim goes back to school and John comes back into the house. The land lady enters the house in a huff. She starts yelling at John that he shouldn't buying drugs from Jim.
Yes. The land lady saw Jim giving John money and assumed it was a drug deal...in broad daylight...on the front lawn.
John tells her he isn't buying drugs and that they bought a pizza together.
Land lady tell him she knows what a drug deal looks like and that it's against the rules to sell drugs in the house.
Now they are yelling at each other.
John goes to the refrigerator and pulls out the left overs in the pizza box.
"We ordered a pizza, this is a pizza."
The DEA Land lady continued with her inquisition.
"We do not let people buy mary-juana (this is the ways she said it and as close to spelling it as I can get) in this house."
Mind you that weed is legal in California and one does not need to do a shady drug deal to obtain it because there is a weed store a block from the house.
At this point John grabs a slice of his pizza, out of the box and shows it to her.
"THIS IS PIZZA! I BOUGHT PIZZA!"
"NO DRUGS!"
They are yelling at the top of their lungs. I am on my laptop, trying to work on my thesis, while this is going on.
At this point John loses his mind and begins flinging pizza slices around the room. After which he runs out of the house.
"You will clean this up!" She yells after them.
After things sort of calm down and I tell her that they bought a pizza a night before and that's what the money was for.
"Drugs are bad." was the only response I got as she walked out of the house.

Follow-up:
Jim and John no longer live here. I am starting to believe that stupidity is like zombie-ism. Contact with one stupid person makes you start to become stupid. Jim, who was going to school to be a doctor was found on Santa Monica Blvd, butt ass naked with a flash light in the middle of the day. I like to think he was looking for his mind.
John moved out of the house soon after. The burden of being the North Hollywood Pizza-Lord grew too much for him. I'd like to think that at this very moment he is in an office, with several pizzas piled high on his desk, Scarface style, waiting for Papa Johns' men to come kill him because you don't fuck with Papa Johns.

Coming Soon: 911 is a joke.

Perfect Storm of Stupidity

There comes a time in every one's life when they have to deal with a stupid person. Everyday as we traverse across this globe we lessen the odds of meeting more stupid people than we know what to do with. Face it, there are some dumb people and then there are some DUMB people. The point of this blog is for me to work through some of the dumb activities of my land lady. I believe that she is the perfect storm of dumb and stupidity all wrapped up in one. This blog however is not an attempt to embarrass her in any way. It's just she goes through all that hard work to being dumb that it needs to be shared and I need to get this out of my system before I lose my mind and kill a bunch of people.
So as they usually say, the only place to start is at the beginning...
My plunge into the depths of stupid hell began a few months ago when our house manager quit to live with her girl friend. I live in an artist compound in Los Angeles. It's cheap but you have to share a room with three other people. This doesn't bother me as I was in the Navy and once shared a room with fifty people. This to me was an upgrade. A tenant from another property was brought into be our Manager/Land Lord/Lady...whatever. A house meeting was called where we'd meet her for the first time. How would this woman greet her new tenants, people whose fate she held in the palm of her hand?...she went into a tirade. She started yelling about dishes and cleanliness and food being put away. Mind you she just got here and this was the first time she looked around. Now from my description you'd imagine there were dirty dishes or food out. Nope...not a one. So she is yelling about a problem we don't have.  However the best piece of dialogue i have yet to share with you:

 "You have to wash your dishes because if you don't a rat will come in the house and piss on the dishes and then you'll all die."

We were floored. I almost lost it. I couldn't hold back the tears from laughing too hard. My over-active imagination saw this big ass gang banger rat walk into the house, throw up a gang sign and then proceed to piss all over our sink.
I am no animal expert but I am sure that if I left a dish in the sink the turn of events that follow would not be 1) A rat sees the plate 2) Comes into the house like a little Santa Mickey 3) Piss on the plate 4) We all die...either from the rat's murder-piss or because of now the punishment of not being clean is death.
I wish I could tell  you this is a made up story but it's as true as true can be. I wish that this was also the last of the dumb things I'd encounter but I wouldn't be writing a blog about it, would I? Things got worst. A lot worst.
Pray for Me.