When the original twelve of us answered the ad in the fall of 1999, we thought we be sharing a duplex with a guy named Luke. Instead, Carole answered. She was Luke's landlord, and although there were no more rooms in the duplex, Carole had some rooms in another house of hers. (We later learned that "Luke" had given out Carole's home number.) When we arrived to look at the rooms, we learned that they would cost $300 a month instead of the $275 originally listed. She told us that the house would consist mostly of professionals and grad students, with a few upper-classmen. The house is actually a range of professionals, grad students, unskilled laborers, upper-classmen, the unemployed, and seniors down through a second year freshman. Frankly, the house sucked.

But some of us were living in cars, and the rest of us had no more than a week left on our current leases. Anywhere within driving distance of the University of New Hampshire, the low end housing market is saturated, and there are people like Carole ready to take advantage of it.

In December, when our pipes had just frozen for the third time in three days, I called Carole. She wandered around the house, trying every faucet, every toilet, and every shower. No water came from any of them. Eventually she gave up and went downstairs. I pointed out to her, as we stood shivering in the basement, that it might help if the pipes were insulated. Her response was that they didn't need to be, since they were indoors. After this, she laid her hand on one of the pipes and said, "These pipes don't feel cold enough to be frozen."

Sometime in February, after we'd hosted our first housing inspection (Check out some scans of the inspector's report) Carole stopped in. Evidently it was a fairly common activity for her to sneak in during the early afternoon when no one was home to make photographs, dig through our mail, and just generally spy on the house. This visit, however, was to figure out how little she could fix to skate past the housing inspector. We found her on the staircase taking pictures of the damaged plaster. Her first statement to us was that "I've heard that you're actively trying to destroy the house." When Aaron replied that, "No, it's falling down pretty well on it's own," she launched into an interesting tirade about how Ed has been keeping the house up for the last eight years, knowing every scrape and bump. This was when she told us that "This is horsehair plaster, and horsehair plaster just doesn't fall down on it's own. You guys are picking at this." If you haven't already looked at our listing of complaints about the house, you can read more there about the falling plaster at the complaints about the house page.

During that same visit, I asked Carole about the water bill. We each prepaid $15/month when we moved in. This seemed a little high to me, and I asked some of the folks I work with. Most use well water, but one lives in Dover. She pays $15/quarter, and she has such modern amenities as a dishwasher and a washing machine, both of which the Skunk House lacks. So I asked Carole if we could have a copy of the water bill, to see how much water we'd actually been using and how much we could expect to have returned to us. She replied that, "Some of the houses get their water bills monthly, and some get them quarterly, and I'm not sure which this one is." What this has to do with digging through her files and making a copy or two, I'm unsure. She clarified some things with her next statement though. (Note that she used the quarterly billing cycle as an excuse to delay refunding the security deposits of the previous year's residents.) She told us that, although she couldn't remember what billing cycle we were on she did know that the lease calls for us to pay her if we over-run our deposit, but says nothing about a refund.

Finally I asked Carole what specifically she'd heard about us "trying to destroy the house." I was concerned, as this was news to me, and I've never failed to get my full deposit back from a landlord before. She told me that what she'd heard, she'd "been told in confidence." Doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, priests and the confessional, all of these have some basis for their confidentiality. There is no such arrangement for slumlords and narcs. In an attempt to sidestep this, I asked her to tell me what she'd heard we were doing, without telling me who told her, but she refused.

Carole visited again the day of our fire inspection. Either through another of her home invasions or a quick call from the narc, she was aware of the inspection and had called the fire marshal within a few hours of our initial call. Actually, she didn't visit. But there was a car in our driveway that was later seen in her driveway. And she was seen talking to the driver. The current rumor is that she was crouched down in the back seat so we wouldn't see her.

All text Copyright Brendan Impson 1999 unless otherwise noted. Images are copyrighted by either myself or Bill. If you want to use any of this junk, please contact me at brendan@bit-net.com