Lay Off My Map!

I have a pet peeve that was confirmed today. I don't like when people interfere with my maps.

I noticed this a few months ago during my brief stint as a Realtor. A fellow Realtor and I were going out to tour properties, and we were mapping them out visually on my road atlas that I keep in my car. At least, I was mapping them out visually. I turned my back for one second, and the next thing I know, my co-worker was permanently charting our course with a yellow highlighter. GAH! I'm sorry, but I paid a good $20 for this atlas, and I don't need to be reminded from this day forward that one day I drove from Blueberry Hill Circle to Wildwood to Prescott.

This pet peeve surfaced again today. I rent apartments in Lowell, MA, which is a very diverse city. So diverse, that I went out and bought a large world map that hangs in my office. My big plan is to put a pin in every country when I rent to someone from that country (and they need to be born there, or be a citizen of that country, otherwise the map would be full of pins after renting to any handful of 5th generation Americans). Speaking of 5th generation Americans, my boss comes in to my office and decides to put a pin everywhere she's ever been. "I was born in New York." PLUNK. "And one summer I lived in Northern Ontario for a month." PLUNK. "And my stepdad's father was from Ovalle, Chili." PLUNK. Even if I remove all of the superfluous pins, my pretty new map is now riddled with pin holes.

Have a little respect, people.

If I ever do this, shoot me

This is an ongoing list of things that I frown upon. If you ever catch me doing any of these things, please shoot me:

1. Order a pre-cooked holiday meal from the supermarket. We have ONE day a year, where the point of the holiday is to feast on homemade food. C'mon people, we're really not that lazy, are we?

2. Ride a motorized scooter. If I ever get so lazy that I can't even walk from point A to point B, don't even bother shooting me. I'll probably suffer from muscle atrophy first, which is a very suitable punishment.

3. Put my children on any type of medication before the age of 18. Your 5 year old is hyper? Your 16 year old is depressed? You don't need to medicate them, you need to thank God that your child is NORMAL.

4. Declaw my cat because I don't want them to ruin my furniture. In fact, if I ever get to the point that I care that much about my furniture, just shoot me, cat or no cat.

5. Put my cat or dog on anti-depressants. Do I really need to elaborate on this one?

6. Buy more cars than the number of adults in my household. (Although I won't shoot my parents who currently have 4 cars for 2 people.)

7. Buy a McMansion.

8. Drive less than a mile to the gym so I can walk on the treadmill for 1 mile.

9. Glare at or roll my eyes at the overweight person at the gym who is using the equipment, as if I'm entitled to it more than they are.

10. Have a gas fireplace in my house that can be turned on & off by a switch, or worse, a remote-control.

11. Put a DVD player in my car. We're not braindead enough that we need to be staring a screen from the time we leave our computer screens at work until we plunk our asses down on the couch at home? If you're taking your family on a roadtrip, guess what? The fun of the roadtrip is not watching "The Incredibles" while you're driving by Niagara Falls.

Maybe if we let our kids be hyper & use their imagination instead of force feeding them Ridalin & Nickelodeon, they'd turn into intelligent, well-adjusted human beings. And, it's FREE! We can save all that medication money & blockbuster bucks to put gas in one of our cars so we can drive to the gym that we're paying too much for.

That's enough for now. The rest of the ones I am thinking of are starting to end with, "well, unless it's this", and I would shoot myself if I was a hypocrit.

It's a dirty job....

This is an actual email that I received at work today:

[Tenant] called to say he thinks someone is living in the laundry room. He said the door is frequently locked and has noticed a young dirty looking man hanging around the building. He also noted that the security doors are still being propped open with sticks even though we have sent multiple notices about this issue. Now are you ready for the gross part? [Tenant] said he could smell.....poop. He went in the laundry room and there is a bucket behind the furnace full of poop. Ick!