Rude Awakening
Since beginning to attend school here at OU I have learned so much. Not the kind of learning that books provide, but more the life lessons that take us from a teenager to an adult. Coming here to school and finding an apartment for me and my family was quite a harrowing experience. When I was searching for an apartment here I sent to many different complexes in the area to check out what they had to offer. I got a whole bunch of brochures and spoke to several rental agents on the phone. Quite honestly, they all looked good, but I decided to rent a townhouse. I had seen the brochure and they had a cute play area on the grounds and a pool and it seemed like a really nice place. I spoke to the woman several times on the phone and told her that I would be moving there with my husband and my one year old daughter and that I had another child on the way. I asked was it a family place and she said it was. I inquired about the playground and she said it had a slide and swings and was really cute.
Well, I was moving to the area to do my prerequisites to attend Chiropractic College and wanted a nice place for my family and I to call home while I did my course work. So we packed up all our belongings into a rental truck including the family cat and dog and drove for 2 days to get here. When we finally arrived after 2 horrendous days in the car and moving truck, all I really wanted to do was unload our mattresses and go to sleep. We walked around the apartment complex while we waited for the woman to come and give us our keys. As we walked around back, we could see the swing set, with one broken swing. And a large tower that had no sides to it and no slide. As we continued around the grounds, we noticed that instead of beautifully landscaped grounds as described and pictured in their brochure, there was just a lot of dirt with an occasional tuft of grass or two. We were disappointed, but I was tired, so when the woman came to let us into our new residence, I was ready to move in. As we walked in, we immediately noticed a large, what appeared to be bleach stain in the center of the living room carpet, and we had been told that the carpet would be replaced. Then in the upstairs bathroom the whole tub and sink which were white ceramic, were all black. We were devastated. This whole thing was not what we had expected, and now what could we do? We knew no one, and had very little money, but we told the woman that we didn't think that this was going to work out. We asked her to give us back half of our security deposit and that she could keep the other half for her inconvenience, but she said no, that she was going to keep it all. Fortunately, we took out our camera and took pictures of the "beautifully landscaped grounds" and "cute playground" before we left. We could not get pictures of the inside of the building however. We then went to a hotel for the night and began a hunt for the perfect apartment again in the morning. We tried several times to get just half of the deposit back, but the woman was nasty and did not want to deal with us.
Well, we had no choice, so we took the apartment complex to small claims court. I was really nervous, as I had never been to court before. Well, we told our side and she told hers. She had brought pictures of their newly improved playground area, but when I showed the judge the brochure they sent me vs. the pictures of what we actually saw when we got there, she almost dropped. She had no idea that we had taken pictures of what the area looked like when we arrived that evening. Well, the judge awarded us all of our deposit back and the woman from the apartments requested to have those pictures we took back from us. I guess even she couldn't deny how awful the complex looked on that day. Well, it is a real dose of grown up reality when you learn that everyone and everything are not what they seem.
