Blizza Blizza

I should really get in bed, but I knew I’d forget about this again if I didn’t blog it now.

People are stupid.

Perhaps I should qualify that a little bit. The geniuses who somehow managed to get themselves hired by my landlord to paint the bathroom in my apartment two days ago are quite possibly the most incompetent repair workers in the history of the universe.

See, when I moved in, the paint was peeling like mad, plaster was cracking and crumbling off the walls, and the bathroom just looked generally bad. In theory, a good repainting job would fix that.

Rule Number One of painting: NEVER APPLY PAINT OVER WET PLASTER OR SPACKLE. The surface needs to cure at least 48 hours before painting, and it needs to be primed. In a humid environment like a bathroom, an enamel coat should be used as a finish coat.

Guess what the maintenance guys did, after dropping big blobs of spackling compound all around my bathroom (which, by the way, I’m still trying to pick off the walls of my shower), breaking the splash guard on the bathtub, coating everything in the area with a layer of plaster dust, and leaving a cell fone on my chest of drawers?

Of course! They painted over the wet plaster. With a non-enamel paint. Without priming first.

Does anyone else think that maybe the management company could save a lot of money by hiring competent painters and not telling them to finish the job in 4 hours or they don’t get paid? Sure, they might pay twice as much to get the job done, and they might have to wait until my lease is up (August) to do the repair (since it would require about a week without the shower being used to keep humidity down), but they’d only have to do massive wall repairs every 10 years, instead of every spring, when leasing season rolls around. The coat of paint over the still-damp plaster has already begun to absorb humidity from the shower, which will render the substrate dry and crumbly within a year, causing the problem to reappear all over again.

I really like it when maintenance guys come into my apartment unannounced and move all my shit around in the bathroom, too. I like hunting for my deodorant when I’m half-awake in the dark at 0630 in the morning trying to get to school to teach a lab. It wakes me up for my students. Really.

Did I mention I’m not renting from these folks next year? Or the year after that? Or EVER AGAIN IN MY LIFE? If you ever need an apartment in the Ann Arbor area, don’t call Varsity Management. That’s V-A-R-S….