Randy and I attended our first annual condo association meeting last night. Out of 22 units, there were representatives for 12 units present (two by proxy, technically).<\/p>\n
It was a pretty straightforward meeting, and much more uneventful than the ones I attended in one of my previous condos. When Matt and I lived in Salem our condo building had 107 units and held meetings every quarter. At the time, I was the youngest tenant in the building (I was in my 3o’s) and the majority of residents were elderly retirees.<\/p>\n
Anyway, all of the the meetings dragged on as pasty white seniors complained about every little thing, from the curtains in the lobby to not wanting to maintain the indoor pool\/gym. Living on fixed budgets, they all wanted to cut corners at, well, every corner.<\/p>\n
Overall, last night’s meeting was far different. There was only one retiree (grumpy, but humorous) and the population of the complex is much more diverse. However, there is always one person who stands out. Last night, we’ll call him Guresh (at least, that’s as close as I could tell his name was because of his heavy accent).<\/p>\n
After the property manager ran through the previous years expenses and next years budget, he opened up the table for conversations\/concerns. Guresh spoke first. I knew we were in for something bad when he started speaking and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Oh lord, here we go.<\/p>\n
For at least the next ten minutes he ranted on about snow plowing. Apparently, from what I could understand, he was upset because our snowing contractor is too efficient. He is happy with the results (admitting they do a good job). He’s also content with the pricing (we pay per inch, not per the number of visits).<\/p>\n
His concern? Plowing is loud.<\/p>\n
Seriously. We had to listen to him kvetch for 10 minutes about how plowing is disturbing to him and he finds it obscene that during a snow fall, the plows will arrive more than once to plow the driveway area. He said the noise is disturbing and when the snow plow recently came at 3PM and then again at 11PM, it managed to keep him awake all night.<\/p>\n
Honestly, a plow being present for 30 minutes causes him to be awake all night long? If a 30 minute distraction prevents sleep for 8 hours, I think he’s got bigger issues than a snow plow.<\/p>\n
Anyway, you could see in the eyes of every other resident that they were ready to move on. Whenever Guresh would stop talking to see how others felt, nobody would respond. Then somebody would ask what, exactly,\u00a0Guresh would like done since nobody else seemed to have an issue…and since snow plowing is essentially a given up here in New England.<\/p>\n
Guresh would have no answer, and just start repeating his case again and again. Ugh.<\/p>\n
The meeting finally ended with nominations for a new board member. Randy kept nudging me to nominate myself, but after hearing Guresh, and having only lived there for 5 months, I wasn’t sure I was ready to run for office. However, if nobody else offered after a lengthy silence, I figured I might consider it. But then Randy, bless his heart, jumped in and said “I nominate myself.”<\/p>\n
And he received a unanimous vote. Yep, I can now proudly say that I’m sleeping with a member of the board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Randy and I attended our first annual condo association meeting last night. Out of 22 units, there were representatives for 12 units present (two by proxy, technically). It was a pretty straightforward meeting, and much more uneventful than the ones I attended in one of my previous condos. When Matt and I lived in Salem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2365"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2366,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365\/revisions\/2366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}