So it’s been an interesting month and a half in NYC/NJ. The internship continues to be fantastic, and my commute is a bit faster now that Uncle Jim let me borrow a bike for my daily train station run. My boss is in Montana for some family member’s wedding, and I’ve finished all of my to-do list, so this post is brought to you from TCG headquarters in Manhattan.
And here comes the drama…
I didn’t realize that I needed to inform my bank that I’d be using my debit card in another area, so after a couple of weeks up here, my debit card stopped working. The bank had cancelled it, thinking it was stolen, and were sending me a new one, and thanks to the bank’s mail-forwarding policies, I got it about a month later. At the same time, someone also tried to cash one of those checks the credit card company sends you every so often. After telling the credit card company that I did NOT authorise a $2,500 check on my account, they told me I had to replace my credit card AGAIN! I now have my fourth Capitol One card in three months, and it took them about a month to finally get it to me because whichever customer service person filed my Lost or Stolen report didn’t actually send my new card, which I found out three weeks later when I called to see why my card hadn’t arrived yet. Thankfully, all of that bullshit is taken care of, and both new cards are safely in my possession, but before they got here, I was living off of loans from my aunt and uncle that I paid back as I got my TCG paychecks. They’re on a Scandinavian cruise right now, about to come back after two and a half weeks, and before they left, they gave me my cousins’ numbers just in case I needed more money while they were gone. It didn’t come to that, at any rate.
Pretty bad, you say. But wait, there’s more…
My roommate Raquel said she was sending me a money order to cover her half of the bills and a little back money she owed me when her bank account was “frozen”. After waiting for it for over three weeks, with several phone calls and such between us, I called her around the end of June to see how she was and let her know about some new bills I had paid and what her share was. To my great surprise and alarm, her cell phone had been cut off. This was the only way I had to contact her as we don’t have a land-line at the apartment and I don’t have her e-mail address, relatives’ contact info, etc. Not fabulously smart on my part, I know, but too late for that. Not only couldn’t I contact her about the money she owed me for bills, but when I spoke to the real estate company, I found out she hadn’t paid any rent since I left at the end of May.
I proceeded to enlist the help of Wade, one of the only people I knew who was in town during the summer, to go check out the apartment to make sure everything was OK there. He said everything was still there and intact, and he left a note for Raquel on my behalf, giving her a Friday the 13th deadline to contact me before I took action. Promptly on the 13th, who did I hear from but Raquel’s “sister” Ashanti, who claimed that Raquel had gotten involved in some sort of fight where shots were fired and somebody got killed. She told me that they didn’t know when Raquel would be “back”, so the sister would come over and pick up Raquel’s things from the apartment if someone could let her in. I told her I’d call a friend to let her in, and she gave me a callback number.
Ok, I think to myself. I called Wade, who dropped the work he was doing to run to the real estate office and get the key. Another surprise: the phone number was wrong. Wade and I both called several times, but nobody ever picked up, and there was no answering machine. Go fucking figure. Wade went over to the apartment anyway to check on it for me, and what do you know, Raquel walks in about twenty minutes later. She was just stopping by to pick up some things before her drive to Atlanta that night, and said she’d been in New Jersey for a while and had lost her phone. Wade asked her about the rent and the phone call from Ashanti; she claimed she had given money to her sister to pay the rent when she was out of town, and that she didn’t know who the phone call was from, but it wasn’t her sister. Wade gave her my cell number again, and asked her for a contact number in Atlanta, which I imagine she gave him reluctantly. The only reason he didn’t have her call me from his phone was that my phone had died on the commute home, and he had to wait for me to call him back.
So I called her friend’s number a little after the time she said she’d be there… and she wasn’t there. I called two more times at roughly 45-minute intervals, and she STILL wasn’t there. Finally, she called me at about 1am. She gave me all the same mess she had told Wade, and I asked her why she hadn’t just given the money to the real estate company up front instead of to her sister. She had no answer for that. She claimed her sister had sent money orders to the real estate company, but either they were mis-labeled, mis-handled, etc. or they never existed in the first place, which seems more likely to me. I asked her when she would be back in Winston, and she said the 18th, so I gave her until the 25th to be out of the apartment. Wade’s down there keeping an eye on the place until I can change the locks, and he’ll be moving back in with me once she’s gone. Is that wise, you ask? He and I are friends now, strictly platonic, and it will only be for nine or ten months anyway, so I’m not terribly fussed about it.
Really, I won’t rest completely easily until she’s out and the locks are changed, but that’s only a little over a week away, and Wade’s holding down the fort for me, so that makes me feel a little better.
So commuting and working my internship really have been the easiest part of my life right now.