The Standoff

Today is a public holiday. A random Monday. Which wouldn’t be weird in the States because if Monday is off it means a three day weekend. But here, where our workweek is Sunday through Thursday, having Monday off is like having an odd little mid-week island, a hiccup where I can almost catch my breath but then have to stutterstep my way back into work on Tuesday. Not that I’m complaining, so far the day has been awesome. I woke up at nine, went back to sleep, woke up at noon, and then walked past a Harley Davidson motorcycle gang of four on a tiny residential street to the Internet café where it is absolutely BLARING Enya. Like I honestly cannot hear my own music through my headphones because Sail Away is making the walls shake. Why am I being so diligent in updating the blog on my middle-of-the-week day off? Because I have plenty to report.

Basically, my landlady is trying to steal my deposit. She picked the wrong two girls to try to screw over because we’re both committed to Egypt for at least another couple years so it isn’t as if she can play the whole “Haha, you already have your ticket to go back home in a couple days and you don’t have time to fight this out” card. We really do have time to fight it out. It isn’t like this is a few hundred pounds, our deposit is one month’s rent, or $700 so it isn’t an amount either of us is willing to walk away from. She claims that when Marisol removed her gaudy chandeliers from every light fixture in the apartment (yes, even kitchen and bathroom), some of them were broken in storage. First, this isn’t our problem, she’s the one who stored them improperly, secondly, at most a broken chandelier would cost MAYBE $5 to fix. So there’s no justification for keeping our whole deposit.

We offered to pay for some air conditioner repairs, which the girl who was living in my room before me broke and then didn’t pay them for and also for a mattress which she’d asked them to buy her but neglected to put in the contract. These things we agreed could reasonably be seen as our responsibility. Then, for goodwill and good bargaining, we added about 300 pounds ($60) to make our absolute best offer 1000 pounds or $200 that we would accept being taken out of our deposit. We expect the rest back and since she’s refusing we are essentially planning to squat in our apartment through February or until she breaks. We will refuse to pay rent on the ground that she already has one month’s rent of ours and that we fairly gave our one month’s notice and therefore have one month remaining in the apartment.

Her real problem is that she bought a new refrigerator for the apartment back in December and I think she regrets it even though we paid for a full HALF of a fridge we will have gotten to use for like two months. Every time she starts to list the things she thinks we owe her money for, she mentions the fridge and then is like, oh, no, slip of the tongue. So we know it is on her mind and that because of it, she is not able to bargain in a rational Egyptian way (this info comes from Maged, Marisol’s boyfriend who has been doing the bargaining on our behalf).

Maged is pretty pissed at how we are being treated. The landlady almost caused a big problem when she said, “Listen, I have a lawyer and if you want to talk to him, you can talk to him,” and Maged was like “Fine, I have a layer, I will get Marisol a lawyer, Margaret IS a lawyer and works with a bunch of lawyers, you go get your lawyer (who we are sure is just this neighbor guy on the floor below us who does patent law) and we’ll all sit down and have a big conversation and get charged by the hour.” And she shut right up.

OH MY GOD THEY ARE PLAYING SAIL AWAY AGAIN. THIS IS THE THIRD TIME SINCE I’VE SAT DOWN.
AND, AS I’VE LISTENED, THEY JUST STARTED IT OVER AGAIN.

This is out of control. I will post an update on the apartment situation in a week or so, assuming I am not living out on the curb with my roommate and our puppy on an mountain of our belongings, but I have got to get out of this All Enya All the Time Zone I’ve stumbled into.