The Worst Apartment Ever

Ok, so I've only lived in two apartments so far, and one of them was a furnished University Apartment, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the apartment I stayed in last year is one of the worst apartments, if not the worst apartment, in the Westwood apartment area. Where do I begin...

I guess there are a lot of little things that add up to big problems, and there are also big things that are just big problems on their own.

1. Smell. The apartment building had a variety of odors, none of which were all too pleasant. Depending on where you were in the building, you could experience a different foul odor. The elevator often smelled of alcohol and trash, our own apartment often smelled of secondhand smoke, courtesy of the chronic weed smokers elsewhere in the complex, and in the hallways you could actually smell a plethora of different aromas as you walked the length of the corridor. Someone wrote "This place STANK!" on the elevator door halfway through the year, and the mark was definitely warranted.

2. Reception. Or rather, lack thereof. It wasn't very convenient getting voice messages and missed calls hours after they were placed. Nor was it fun having to go outside the building every time I wanted to make a call.

3. Ya know, the place was just OLD, and in need or repair. They just need to shut down the building for a while and renovate the place. When we first moved in, they claimed that they "cleaned" the carpet, which apparently doesn't include removing bits of trash and nails. My closet doors were broken all year, though they "fixed" it a few times. At one point in the year all the burners in our stove stopped working. The water from our bathroom sink and shower was brown for a while, and sometimes it smelled like sewage. I learned to always smell the water first before using it.

4. Floor plan. The apartment had the most awkward floor plan I have every seen. Who makes rooms in pentagon shape?? It's like the place wasn't designed to accommodate furniture (or people for that matter).

5. Roaches. I saved the best for last, because this is what really made the whole apartment experience. Let me introduce you to our 5th roommate, the cockroach colony. They were there when we first moved in, and who knows how long they had already been there. Naturally, we complained, filled out request forms, etc, every time leading to an attempt at spraying down the place and leaving nice smells (see #1). However, I am fairly confident that all the spraying did was cause the roaches to evolve into bigger and stronger roaches. Survival of the fittest at its best. In the beginning of the year, they were actually pretty small and slow. Towards the end of the year, they had gotten much bigger in size, and I'm pretty sure some of them were starting to evolve wing-like structures on their backs. Thankfully I'm not going to be around when they finally do evolve the ability to fly. Seeing as how the feeble attempts of the apartment service were only making the roaches stronger, we had to take matters into our own hands. This marked the beginning of a longstanding war between us and the roach colony. We bought traps and our own spray, but the roaches had numbers on their side. Clearly, a large scale attack was needed. And so about halfway through the year, The Purge happened - we cleaned everything possible, sprayed in every corner, and for once we thought everything was going to be ok. We slept peacefully that night. Unfortunately, it was a false sense of comfort. The next day, the roaches were already back. I'm pretty sure all we did was anger them. And so we conceded to a truce - they stay in the kitchen and come out only at night, and we'd just let them be. This worked for a while, but blatant violations of the truce soon began, and we were powerless to stop it, still being demoralized from the failed Purge. It got to the point that sometimes I would open up a drawer, watch a cockroach scramble out from inside one of my bowls, and be like "eh." By the end of the year, we knew that we had clearly lost the war. Whenever I would go out into the kitchen at night, I would give the roaches a 10 second grace period after I turned on the lights to run and hide in their little corners, so I could at least pretend like they weren't there. Towards the end of the year though, they just stayed where they were after I turned on the lights, mocking me, knowing that I was defeated and powerless...

For the price we paid, the apartment was nothing short of robbery. There was ONE redeeming factor about the place, and that was that we had free fire in the fireplace. You could flip a lightswitch, and a fire would come on in the fireplace! Sometimes I would turn on the fire even if it was hot, because it was the only good thing about the apartment, and I wanted to cling to that light in dark times.