Korean Marlboro Bitch

On Thursday night (Friday morning) at 3am, it came to my attention that the new front door key to my building did not work. What does one do at 3am when your landlord is inaccessible? You ring a neighbor’s door and apologetically excuse yourself and explain the situation, right? Well, that’s what I did. Then on Friday afternoon, I asked one of the individuals that kindly opened the door to please not lock it because I would be unable to get a hold of a key until today and I would be arriving at A.M. hours from work. So what do you think happened last night after a long and shitty day at purgatory? I arrived home to a locked front door knob with useless key to match. So what would you do in this situation? Well let me tell you what I did. After, several failed attempts to make sure that the key was in fact not working. I spied the lit windows of neighbors before deciding which buzzer of 3 possible units to ring. Hmm, the lady with the baby living in the basement apartment was not a good idea, neither was the dark apartment of the new Japanese tenant across from me. My best option was the second floor apartment with all of its lights on, the very same one I buzzed the night before. What happened next?

The Korean-Marlboro bitch girl answers the telecom system, in an un-neighborly what-the-fuck manner. She resorts to an almost three minuet long spiel about my resorting to inconvenience them and keeping their gazillion watt lit apartment from sleep. She then shared her epiphany on my need to contact the landlord regarding the situation. Ingenious! This bitch must have been a Head Engineer for Samsung. Unfreaking believable! I explained to her in a reserved I-m –about-to-give-you-a-piece-of-my-mind tone that there were only 4 units in the building and that anyone of us could have received the faulty key and that the only logical thing to do after failing to reach our landlord was to resort to the generosity of neighbors. Miss. Smoke-a-lot has definitely never ever seen an episode of Sesame Street or Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood. She then puffed an annoyed sigh through the speaker, buzzed the door open for a thousandth of a second and made me wait about another minuet before buzzing me in. I was fuming as I passed her 2nd floor tobacco smoke shielded front door. It was a reasonable and unpreventable situation and she totally lacked tolerance and understanding, given the situation. But her time will come. Incidentally, she sleeps right below me and I will no longer strive for light-footedness or tip-toe acrobatics for her sake. I been practicing this art ever since her first move-in day, when she had my landlord call me at 9:45pm on a Friday night because the “rolling of my desk chair was bothering her.” I hope for her sake that she’s a late sleeper or knows a good realtor. And heaven forbid that she ever gets locked out or in need of non-life-threatening assistance. While laughing over the situation with my Japanese neighbor this morning, he explained to me that she must still be attached to her cultural don’t-bother-me-for-a-cup-of-sugar attitude. I’m not too familiar with anything Korean except for kim-chi, which I have little love for but I as I explained to him, “Koko wa Korea ja arimasen.” (This is not Korea)

Get ready for American rental rights honey and forget North Korea but because I’m above you now.

(Insert menacing Kim Jong II-laugh here)

*image croped and edited from...