The Union Breaks Father's Day Promise

The Union Hotel, the subsidized apartment building I live in, is managed by people who can't figure out how to treat their tenants with respect.

The latest insult happened today. We were told days ago that there would be a Father's Day Brunch at noon in the community room today. There were notices placed in the halls to that effect, and at the front desk.

The notices said that there would be no 7 AM breakfast today.

As I have said before, I don't want their breakfasts anyway, so I have insisted on not being woken up at 7 in the morning with reminders of the breakfast on the intercom. So as a result of my complaints, lists of tenants who wanted breakfasts were created, and only the people on the lists were called for them.

There's no reason for the intercom reminders anyway if the management could just make the meals happen at the scheduled time.

Today, Anitra and I went down to the community room to join the Father's Day Brunch at its scheduled time, 12 noon.

We saw nothing happening and asked the desk person what was up.

What was up was that the meal had already happened at 10:45 AM. She had gotten a call from management just this morning telling her to notify everybody on the breakfast call list of the change of times.

Just because some bonehead imagined that the brunch would happen in lieu of the breakfast, they told her to handle it as she would have handled the regular Sunday morning breakfast, even though it was an entirely different event. A noon Father's Day brunch is not a breakfast.

First, they broke the promise about when it would happen. Then they violated their own protocols, which called for announcements of onetime events between 8 AM and 10 PM.

I've told the story about how the intercom protocols came about in my column for Real Change. I titled it for Adventures in Bloggery as Be Silent, Consume, Die. All I wanted was not to be called on the intercom at times when I would want to be sleeping. I agreed to allow that they would call me during the day for special events like this. THEY insisted on that. So I have taken them at their word on it, and come to expect it.

Their word means crap.

They can't ever put themselves in our shoes. They have less respect for the people who live here then they have for ugliest fish in the lobby aquarium.

This comes right on the heels of similar broken promises involving a nutritional class (PTSD, posted just June 5).

It compounds the anger I expressed in Rage And Counter-Rage, just last May.

The inability of these people to figure out what they need to do to keep my experience here from amounting to one insult after another did not begin with the current manager. See Social Services Gripe for a complaint about the last one.

But the current management can't seem to get anything right.

PS: Only a fraction of the residents are on the call list (I'm blanking on the number -- I remember it as being 7 out of 52 -- but I know its fewer than a third.) So in excess of 30 residents were misled about the time the meal would happen, and Anitra and I weren't the only ones in the lobby at noon finding out we were screwed.

Self-Abuse

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. Usually I wait until the newsletter is out, but I had too much fun with this one to hold it back. Thanks to Tim Harris for directing my attention to my paradigmatic subversiveness.-- wes]

When I agreed to write these little columns, essays, rants, or whatever you want to call them, I had to agree to one rule. It was not, "Keep it clean"; it was not, "Don't write too much." It was, "You can make fun of the staff and management all you want, but don't make fun of the tenants."

I have respected that rule. But I admit it pains me. I SO love to make fun. All these people off limits, so sad.

Then I realized that I was wrong. The rule doesn't say I can't make fun of ANY tenant. It says I can't make fun of ANY OTHER tenants. I can make fun of me all I want. It then occurred to me, additionally, that many of the other tenants would greatly enjoy that. So here goes.

Wes Browning is a sinful self-deprecator: he deprecates himself a minimum of 3 times a day. His record: 16 self-deprecations in one afternoon, in one public toilet.

When he's not self-deprecating, Wes is an idolater, sloth, drunk, left wingnut, and hack writer. Those aren't insults, those are his bragging points.

Wes Browning is a cynical bastard, and so was his Momma: his Momma was SO cynical she thought Diogenes the Cynic was a fraud. Ha!

Wes Browning is a pseudo-intellectual geek who wouldn't know Diogenes the Cynic from Britney Spears if he saw them both side-by-side in uniform. If he can't figure it out by googling it he can't know it.

Speaking of his Momma, when she was pregnant with Wes she thought she just had a bad case of gas. After he was born the doctors asked who the father was. She put down "Nalley's, Extra Hot, Thick and Chunky."

Wes Browning is a maladjusted, senile delinquent, with delusions of genius. He's a 58 year-old self-identified Goth who laughs too much and wears Hawaiian shirts all the time. Someone needs to tell him you cannot be Goth and wear Hawaiian shirts all the time. Or be 58. Or laugh.

Wes Browning is a subversive. He subverts paradigms, because he has callous disregard for all that is decent and paradigmatic. He just looked up paradigmatic on the internet and couldn't find it, so he doesn't know what it means, but he has a callous disregard for it anyway.