05.18.08 - 7:52 pm

"Jordan, this is Nikki over at Sterling Management. We spoke yesterday on charges on your past account. We dont have any sign of you dropping off a 30 day notice, so we are going to stick by those charges - charging you through the 20th of july. if you want to contest those charges we need something in writing, and then if you have maybe a copy of that 30 day notice you can submit those at the same time. Feel free to give me a call if you have any questions."

...No, no, no. You were doing fine, you'd been courteous and receptive to courtesy, you'd established trust with the embarrassing truth about your own company, and now this ham-handed segue into diversionary narrative. It won't do. It's stupid and boring, Nikki....

you filthy rube. this was when my optimistic hopes for appreciating you and your compassion immediately ceased to exist.

i had moved out of my apartment on june 30th of this year. one of the worst days i can recall. i had my father rent me a carpet steam cleaner and hoped to use it along side all of my eager ambitions to make my two bedroom abode appear as if no one had ever lived within it. there was some water damage to the carpet. there was a thumb print in ink from ben hemson on the bathroom wall. the inside of the oven desperately needed a degreaser. there was mildew in the window wells. thumb tack and staple holes in the walls. i over estimated my desire to care after all my things were loaded into the back of that 17 foot uhaul. so i left it. i left corvallis. i left broken and defeated. worn out and tired. i left the apartment unlocked, with the keys on the kitchen counter.

july 20th, 2007
voice: "hey, is this jordan?"
me: "yes."
voice: "...do you still live at A25, kings landing?"
me: "no, i moved out on june 30th."
voice: "...really? oh. ok. thanks."

that was peculiar. what a real fuck up of miscommunication that must have been. i discarded the importance of the phone call until two weeks later a bill arrived requesting i pay $350 for the 20 days i lived in the apartment past my move out date.

*this was an old entry i dug up and never posted. ultimately, the situation was time consuming and irritating. i made sure that most of the irritation was inflicted upon them however. all of this because they couldnt find my 30 day move out notice. they have a blank stack of them in the sterling management office. just a stack of blank copies. so when it was time to move out, i grabbed one, filled it out and turned it in to the person at the desk. why would i have grabbed two, filled out two and kept one for myself? it just didnt seem necessary if i had handed it personally to someone else. mother scoffed at this and said obviously i should have. so, im pretty sure i had the sphinx pick me up one of these copies, fax it to my mom. she deftly adjusted it to make it look like an original, nonfaxed copy and got it to me. i wrote on it as i would have were it may of 2007 and faxed it to the number listed. i called the next day. they didnt get it. i had faxed it to their eugene office, and i would need to fax it again to a different number. since, having the eugene office fax it to the corvallis office would have just been plain absurd. so i faxed it again and laid in wait. this cost me four dollars. days went by. so i started the barrage of phone calls. i called nikki. i called nikkis secretary. i called desk clerks. i called nikkis boss. i was referred back to nikki by her boss. i called the sterling financial divisions. i called nikki some more. i called every day, multiple people. no one seemed to know what was going on with my account, where my money was or when i was going to get it. no one had talked to anyone else. it was as if the whole company was completely incapable of communicating with other sections of their business.

finally, the extremely irritated lady who processes the checks at the eugene branch of sterling begrudgingly informed me that a check had been mailed. i dont even remember how much i was owed. maybe $130. but christ, they certainly were hoping i would have just caved, given in and forked over $350 just because they said so.

my situation wasnt isolated. if it happened to me, i know it must occur to dozens of other college kids who either dont know what to do, or how to respond or they give up the fight prematurely. i owe this battle to my mother, who encouraged me to keep at it.

sterling management: a shit company.