Marky Mark

First impressions can be startlingly accurate. The first time I met my landlord Mark, I comment to James that it's not that he is a bad landlord, he's just not very good at it. It's the same way that a child taking their first steps isn't bad at walking, they just haven't got the hang of it yet. Mark is like an eternal toddler, always tumbling along in a way that makes one think that his whole life is about to fall ass backward onto the ground. Somehow, this never happens, yet he never seems to get moving any better.

Case in point, he is renovating our basement, for about the third time since I've moved in. Nobody has lived in it yet, but it is constantly in a state of repair. What he's been doing down there, I just don't know. Obviously not finishing the job. To his credit, apparently the whole place flooded once, but that only serves to prove my theory on him.

Moreover, today we got our bathroom cabinet. When we first moved in, he said that our bathroom needed a cabinet or a shelf. First he said that if we got one, he'd repay us for it. James volunteered to field that one, because he spends more time at Ikea than I do. A few months pass and we haven't picked up a shelf. Then one day, Mark shows up with a cabinet. A six foot tall cabinet that he feels may solve our bathroom storage issues.

I'm sure you all watched Sesame Street during your formative years and had the concepts of "big" and "small" drilled into your head by a muppet, but in case you haven't, Elmo makes a compelling argument outlining the differences between the smallest of the small (a shelf) and ridiculously gargantuan (the cabinet that Mark gave us.) Safe to say, it didn't stay in the bathroom. It's now holding board games in the dining room. Seeing that his plan had failed, Mark today rendered us with another cabinet, this time one that hangs on the wall. I did the measurements, and the cabinet that is awaiting instalation now is exactly as large as a cabinet can be for the space it has to occupy in the bathroom. This is not a good thing. Considering that our bathroom is tiny and unforgiving, and we're dealing with Mark, tollerance for error is something that I cannot be too interested in having. I somehow feel that this whole thing will also end badly. It will end badly when he installs it next weekend, even though he is in the building right now.

Not bad at his job, just not that good at it.