A long, true story about evil children, aquariums and why, for the second time, I sympathize with Pat:
We were moving out of our horrible mould filled, constantly-flooded-basement, regularly leaking ceiling-ed duplex rental, which we affectionately called "the Shit Shack." We took all our items with us, except my fancy aquarium, which I really felt was best to leave for my SO and I to deal with after all our well meaning, but overly confident family had left (after having graciously helped us move everything else). We had moved out a day earlier than scheduled, so we left the aquarium and stand in our old place for the night, with the plan to return in the morning and deal with the process of carefully transferring giraffe to buckets, cleaning the aquarium itself, etc.
Just to clarify, the guy to be moving in to our old place was an early 30's single dad, with his 4 yr old son. And this guy went into the basement when the water was an inch deep, and unlike a sane person who cares about his child's health, said "this is great! I'll take it!" Oh, and he was with his girlfriend who was carrying her 9 mnth old baby (from a different father, she asserted to me), who was telling me she and her baby would be moving in after things were settled. He told me how both himself and the girlfriend were both in the process of divorcing the other parents of the two children. Yeah. We'll call him Mr. Brilliant. My SO really wanted to convince them to not move in and urgently pointed out the ant problem, along with numerous other problems with the place, but oh no, by the next day they had filled out all the paper work.
So the morning after we moved out my SO and I wake up tired and sore from the previous nights work, and head back to our old house bright and early to tackle the aquarium. We just get inside when the front doorbell rings, and surprise, surprise it's Mr. Brilliant and his 4 yr old. We say hello, and explain to him that we will call him, as arranged, when we are done moving out. He explains that he has been sitting outside with a full van and his kid waiting several hours for us to show up. I let him know that our dealing with the aquarium will take several hours, and so he will need to wait to move-in until the time previously agreed upon, and go back to scooping out water into pails. He somehow takes this as a cue that: 1) I have agreed to baby sit his child and 2) he has been invited to start moving stuff in. Somehow my SO, in he always good natured manner, ends up helping Mr. Brilliant move his stuff in, in spite of the fact I need him to keep the siphoning water from spraying everywhere. As Mr. Brilliant starts hauling in his stuff, his child alternates between violently smacking the aquarium glass, and running out the front door -which has been wedged open - and into the street. Since I am holding a bucket of water with a siphon that is draining the aquarium into the bucket a-la-stealing-gas-from-a-car, I can not move away from the aquarium without disastrous results, so I watch Mr. Brilliants kid totter out the door and possibly into on coming traffic. At around this point Mr. Brilliant tells me that he plans to paint the wall I have the aquarium set up against red, because it will match his dragon collection. The next few hours move gradually from me pleasantly reminding Mr. Brilliant to keep an eye on his boy to me firmly telling the boy to get out of the way as I try to deal with 40 pound buckets of water while he violently pounds the glass, to me instructing the boy "SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW AND DO NOT TOUCH THE GLASS," followed by the boy standing up and again pounding the glass, followed by me stopping Mr. Brilliant mid load and telling him he and his child need to leave "RIGHT NOW." Basically a job that should have only taken a couple hours total is now only half way thru, and three hours have passed due to the fact that Mr. Brilliant somehow roped my SO into working for him and because I’ve spent most of the time dealing with Mr. Brilliant’s kid either pounding the glass, trying to go down to splash in the flooded basement waters, or worrying that the kid is about to get hit by a car.
To explain one more detail before I go any further: The slum landlord of our old place fully acknowledged that he was aware of the mould and constant water seepage, but did nothing about it, so he agreed to give us our damage deposit back a week before we moved out, no questions asked.
So finally Mr. Brilliant realizes I am standing in the middle of the room glaring at him, unmoving and ready to just flip out. He leaves with his boy.
My SO and I chuckle about how both of us are total strangers to Mr. Brilliant, and could be child-killing maniacs for all he knows, and how this is the second time (insert an even longer story about the day of our open house here) where he and his girlfriend have left us alone with their children without even asking us if we cared to deal with said children. We finish siphoning the water out of the aquarium, which gets done fairly quickly without all the distractions, and lift the aquarium stand for the first time in two years, and that's when we see it. "It" is a patch of mould. A large green patch of wet, soggy mold of a very, very different colour than the rug. And it's a big patch, about 6 ft wide and 2 ft deep.
We take the aquarium, the giraffe and the stand, and walk out of the house. We go, leaving the key on the counter, and smiling to ourselves knowing that this is the last we'll ever see of the horrible mould, the horrible sinus infections brought on by it, and the horrible house itself. We go knowing that we have conveniently given Mr. Brilliant a clear picture of the life he can expect to enjoy in The Shit Shack.
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Topic: 9/8/05- 9a: Children and the Aquarium. (Read 9403 times)