So, my wife just p3wned the landlord.

[mainegreen]

My wife is a sweet, lovely, wonderful person. But WHOAH UNTO THE PERSON WHO SHE PERCEIVES AS THREATENING OUR CHILD.
My landlord just found that out.

Backstory is that our building has six units heated off on giant boiler in the basement, using forced hot water and circa 1920 radiators. It was inefficient, and often the people on the first floor would be freezing, while those of us on the third had our windows open it was so hot. About two weeks ago our landlord posted a note on the lobby door indicating that he was replacing the heating system, and would have a separate boiler for each unit, with individual thermostats. Great! Sounds reasonable.

What he failed to indicate was that he was putting the boilers in the apartments, ripping out the radiators, installing baseboard heating, and replacing all the hot water pipes (all exposed and painted). I was pissed he failed to mention that until two days before contractors were arriving to do that. My wife was livid. Purple style livid really. You see, while there is no flaking paint in the apartment, and the surface layers of paint are lead free, we've done the tests and the lower layers are most certainly lead paint. Tearing the apartment apart like he was planning would have filled the apartment with lead paint dust. Not good for two year olds. Especially without giving us warning enough to find another place to be when this happens.

Well, she being the person she is, contacted the EPA and DHS (Department of Human Services) being pretty sure that what he was doing was not the right and proper way to do things, and low and behold turns out she was right. So, thinking the landlord would listen to reason if the law was on her side, called him up and explained to him about a certain set of federal and state laws that require him to give a certain amount of notice as well as perform the work in a lead-safe manner. He got mad at my wife and basically told her she was full of shit. That really motivates my wife.

This morning the landlord had to come to our apartment, with his plumber and contractors, and spend two hours with an EPA representative and a DHS worker as they berated him for his ignorance of the law, instruct him and contractors on the proper and legal way to perform the work, and informed him just how lucky he and his pocketbook were that this was caught before he had work performed on any of the units in the building.

Then he had to apologize to my wife.

My wife informed me he seemed a bit sheepish the whole time.

This is the second landlord to make the mistake of crossing her.

Silly landlords.

:D

[billyskank]

1. Your sig line is so true.

Do something by hand? Fuck that! Let me just go off and write a tool to do it...

[DS1]

2. I'd never noticed that

while he writes an automated way to update automated backup scripts to handle new databases automatically :D

instead of just adding a simple line

[mainegreen]

3. It's why all frameworks become giant unweildy pieces of crap.

Because they go for the goal of:

$application = new application();
$application->doEverythingPossible();
$application->output();

Nice in theory.
Horribly painful in practice.
But, boy howdy do you have a blast creating the framework!

[billyskank]

5. Oh jeez. Java frameworks get on my tits.

Don't write all that hard to understand code! Just edit these fifteen arcane XML files instead!

Somebody obviously thinks this is an improvement. :shrug:

[bertha katzenengel]

4. Go, Mrs. mainegreen!

:yourock: