Fun story time:

I moved to DC a few years ago. When I did so, I had no house and no job. I was absolutely, insanely lucky to get both within three days. Even more incredibly, the housing situation I got was... free.

The deal I got from her daughter-- who was running this whole operation-- was that I live in the English basement of a very nice, very expensive house of a woman that came from old, old Pullman money. She was 82 and her mental health was failing, and she recently crashed her car because of her lack of mental faculties. My job was to help her out for 15 hours a week, mostly by driving her whenever she needed. I worked nearby, so if she ever needed me to come back to drive her, it wouldn't be a problem. Of course, this became insanely frustrating because she was determined to be independent and drive herself. I ended up having to play a coy game with her daughter of intentionally "losing" the key so she wouldn't drive, deal with her resentment for it, and do more and more basic things for her as her health declined. At a certain point, I was making or driving her to nearly every meal she had because she simply could not cook anymore. She'd leave the stove running for hours, or, more often, would try to eat raw meat because she forget that you have to cook things, and then would argue that's she's been doing it for decades and I'm trying to take away her freedom.

My point is, it was stressful. It became almost a much more time consuming ordeal, and I was keeping logs of everything I was doing for her daughter as well as keeping tabs of her disease's progression (a mix of things, really, but Alzheimer's early stages with rapidly progressing dementia were among them. Other things I'm not sure of, but the Alzheimer's clearly wasn't the primary issue at the time I was there.)

After some time, she started taking longer vacations to her farm up in Vermont. Getting out of the city was good, and the DC weather was becoming more unbearable for her. When this happened, her daughter decided I was would need to continue to 'earn my rent' somehow, and I was asked to do some physical labor around the house. I had no problem with that at first, but it eventually became a "please do all the yardwork that hasn't been done in a year or more around the sides and back of the house." This was a problem for two reasons for me:

1.) It was the dead of DC summer, so really fucking hot, and really fucking humid.

2.) The yards were formed entirely of ivy, kudzu, and bamboo. If you don't know what those three plants are like, they grow fast. The bamboo at this point was near 20 feet fall and the kudzu hid an entire alcove I didn't even know existed. The ivy covered paths and went halfway up the side of the house.

Regardless, I still felt I should do it because, hey, free rent. However, the daughter (or at least her husband), felt I wasn't do it fast enough. One week after asking me to do all of this, while I'm still working full time at two jobs on campus, they emailed me that I wasn't earning my keep. I apologized, worked harder on it (about three hours an evening or more at this point), and completed everything else they added to my list.

As I was cutting out the last of the bamboo and kudzu and whatever else was in there in a particularly productive feeling evening, I went back in, showered, and sat down to realize I had spent seven straight hours clearing everything away. I had 36 mosquito bites, 12 open cuts on my arms, and my muscles were killing me, but it felt great to complete it. Even better knowing that I had completed three days before, finally, after three years of fighting with terribly ruin bureaucracies at universities, I'd be taking classes for real, with good financial aid, and making just enough to be able to pay the remainder off.

I then checked my phone to see an email from the daughter saying that, with her mother traveling so much more lately, and they're trips to see her, they would need to start charging me $1500 a month because it was just very expensive to not do so. They knew full well I couldn't afford it, they knew full well that I was finally starting school, and worse, they framed it as a benefit for her mother, that they would be getting her a nurse (which, I happened to know was a lie, and here, years later, speaking to her neighbor I still know who is close with the mother, know was a lie because they have another student paying them and no nurse has ever visited), and claiming the cost was an insult to me personally as every single person in that family was making a half million a year, not to mention the amounts of money the woman had in the first place.

I had 30 days to find a new place, move out, move into the new place, while starting school, and a full time job, and having no vehicle to speak of. They burned me bad. The worst I've ever been burned.

I'm still reeling from the financial consequences of the entire ordeal because I ended up four miles from work, school, and home from any point. This was around the time I was having my massive, literally paralyzing headaches I was telling some people about at the hubski meetup, and I had to be biking everywhere. This stopped when I had to eventually go to the emergency room for the headaches, and drop out of my classes because I could not physically make it anymore, and pay way more money than I had between transportation, money owed to the university (which ended up being double the original amount monthly because-- surprise! clerical errors), and my insane fucking rent for a tyrant, bourgeois landlord, and the sky high utilities. No food. I didn't have money to buy food. My bosses, the saints that they are, bought all my food, outside my occasional things simply to remain sane.

So anyway, rambling aside, fuck bourgeois shits. Fuck kicking people out of the place they live to make more money. Fuck capitalism.

Hey, sorry to hear about this man. Frustrating shit. Looks like you just gotta bear with it and get over this bump, but if you ever mention your new place when you move, you can bet you'll have to rent the place next door as well to store all the house-warming presents I'm gonna send your way. Take care man, and let Hubski know if we can help.

We're so low right now. We were almost there.

Fuck.