Give Me My Spare Key

   The apartment complex that I live in keeps one spare key in the office. This is for practical reasons, like if the renter gets locked out on accident, or if there is repair work that needs to be done or an emergency. Typically, this is a reasonable practice.
   However, when the office gives your spare key out to potential renters so that they can view the apartment, this policy becomes a huge problem. The giving of your particular apartment key was, granted, an accident, but what a mistake to make!

Not cool to be handing this out. 

   This happened to me today. I was coming back from picking my daughter up from school, and as I walked up to my apartment, a rather large Samoan family is coming right out of my apartment. I flip out, and I'm talking spitting fire flip-out, and the poor lady, I assume the mother, is holding up what I recognize as a key that has come from the office. They all have little paper tags on them and this one does have my apartment number on the tag. So I try to calm down, because this lady looks truly horrified.
  "Someone lives here?" she asks, and you can see the confusion on her face, and the older daughter is looking pissed, and to be fair, I did just go off on them for coming out of my apartment, and this mistake is not their mistake. What doesn't help is that the office lady is still in the office, and is not there to mediate at all; she has just set these people loose in the the apartment complex with a random key. Why not; what the hell? Who wants to do their job when they can just sit on their ass behind a computer?
   "I live here! This is my apartment!" I yell, although I am trying to calm down and redirect my rage. My daughter is just sitting back and watching the fireworks. The girl is giggling; my child is weird.
   "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry!" the mother is saying, and I do feel bad, because I would hate to be in her shoes. How uncomfortable, and she has to be wondering if I am a loony-tune and if I'm fixing to accuse her of stealing things that she didn't take. (I mean, I did check because I'm not stupid, but this was an honest family, nothing was missing.)
   Since I have the complex number in my cell, I call up there and give the lady an earful, but she's just stammering "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, it's been one of those days!" I don't give a shit what kind of day you've had, you just gave my key to a random stranger, and I was only lucky that these people were decent.
   These people were lucky as well, because this could have been so much worse. What if I was a freak? What if they walked into my apartment and I had like, 50 pet snakes. What if I had a bunch of bondage shit hanging from my ceiling??? What if I was a creepy voodoo practitioner and they walked in on one of my evil rituals and I stole there souls forever??? Look at what happened in that Kate Hudson movie, The Skeleton Key. She plan out got her body snatched. They just got yelled at by a pissed-off single mom who tried to calm her ass down when she realized that this was not their fault. This could have been so much worse. No thanks to the apartment office lady, this worked out peaceably, because neither one of us were freaks. 

Apartment Hunting (Yay, I'm Moving!!)

   Oh my lord. A nightmare. A veritable slew of worries, stress, and apartment manager ladies who give you the stink-eye when they discover the amount that you earn. (And you think you can afford to live here?!) Okay, I'm not that friggen poor, and I resent those looks. Don't even get me started on credit checks. A nightmare. My credit, as I have said before, is bad, but the only items in collection are unpaid ER bills from that time when I had no insurance. My student loans are in good standing, but they are high, which lowers my score, some kind of debt-to-credit ratio thing that I don't really get.
   I started looking a while back, but for the longest time, the apartment size that I wanted wasn't available. I remember one conversation with an office lady, which she attempted to have at the top of her lungs.
   Me: "I'm looking for an apartment. I would like to look at one of your one bedrooms or your small two bedroom floor plans."
   Her: "WE HAVE TOWNHOUSES! YOU WANT TO LOOK AT A TOWNHOUSE!"
   Me: "No, I would like to look at one of the smaller floor plans."
   Her: "COME LOOK AT A TOWNHOUSE!"
   Me: "I really am only interested in a smaller floor plan. Do you have a smaller apartment available?"
   Her: "YES! COME SEE OUR APARTMENTS!"
   Guess what she had available to show us when we got there? If you guessed townhouses, then you guessed right, Plus -- she had three other appointments scheduled at the same time. Really?! I think I deserve my own appointment slot. And what part of smaller apartment was hard to understand? My daughter and I don't need much space; also, I want a rent that I can easily afford. I don't want to be eating peanut butter constantly because that's the only food I can afford. If I have extra money because I have a lower rent, all the better. I have some expensive hobbies. I like to game, I like to go to the ballet, I like to travel, and don't get me started on the amount I spend on books. (BOOKS!!!) Plus, I like to eat. Good food, not peanut butter on crappy, cheap-ass bread.
   Well, after many attempts to view an apartment of the size and price that I wanted, I found one. I was ready too. That lady was probably wondering what the hell she got herself into. $150 holding fee? I'll be back in two minutes. Hell yes I'm putting that apartment on hold. I'd been looking for a month; I wasn't losing that place because someone came in and swooped it up from under me -- exactly what my sister did to someone else, by the way. Someone wanted the apartment she got, but they didn't put a hold on the place, so she gleefully swooped it up.
   But now was the nerve-wracking part. Getting approved. Gotta make 3 times the rent, they want good credit, good leasing record, and the list goes on. Well, I didn't have good credit, but I was willing to pay a bigger deposit, which is usually what they want. So I wasn't expecting to get a call from them saying I was not approved because I was breaking my lease. Also, they told the that this was somehow put onto my credit already. What?! No I wasn't, and why was something like that on my credit? (It wasn't. I don't know where they got that.)
   So off to my current home's office to get the paperwork saying that I'm not breaking the lease, which takes about 5 minutes because I wasn't breaking the lease,  and I bum a ride from my mom to the new place, all-in-all taking probably about 15 minutes. Imagine those people's surprise when I bust up in that office, paperwork in tow. Deny me? I don't think so.
   So the official move out date is the 11th, and I'm a ball of nerves because I won't feel that the apartment is really mine until the key is in my hand, the lease is signed, and my stuff is inside. Because anything that can go wrong, will go wrong :p
    Please, just let it go wrong with someone else.