I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it looks as though I won’t be billed for the serious lawn infraction I mentioned a few days ago. Linette called me yesterday at work to tell me that she’d been visited by two men claiming to be officials from the city of Ypsilanti. They apologized for the half-assed, forced lawn mowing that we’d been subjected to, and assured her that we would not be billed. The story that they told her, which I’m not quite sure that I believe, is that their man had been instructed to mow the lawn of another house across town with the same number, but that he’d somehow become confused. According to their story, once they realized that he was mowing the wrong lawn, they had him stop immediately — thus explaining the fact that job had been done so poorly… Is that what really happened, I guess we’ll never know.
Personally, I think that probably is what happened, but I’m letting Linette think that it really had to do with the massive amount of power I yield through this blog. She thinks that I scared them off, and who am I to crush her dreams? What better Mother’s Day gift could you be given, after all, than the illusion that the man you picked to spend your life with isn’t just a pathetic little blogger, but an immensely important power broken who can, with the snap of his cyber fingers, have city officials cowering on his doorstep, begging for his forgiveness?
Let’s say that it was true, and this blog did have something to do with their backing down. If you do the math, I’m still an asshole. Let’s say that I spend two hours a day working on the site, OK? As I’ve been doing it for about four years now, that would be 2,920 hours. Even if I were just making the federally prescribed minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, that would be $15,038. So, if I’d been working for someone else all this time, doing anything, I’d have at least that much money right now. Instead, however, I put in all that work at MM.com and, as a result it all, got out of a $135 fine from the city. Pretty impressive, right? Even if you factor in the occasional 5% kickback from Amazon for someone’s purchase of a ball shaver, that’s still pretty fucking bad.
Oh, and if you’re one of the people out there who think that perhaps the men at the door were pranksters, just getting my hopes of, I’ve since received confirmation from a reader of this site who knows a thing or two about the workings of city government. He forwarded a note that he’d become privy to that stated essentially the same thing that my wife was told at our front door — our lawn, while long, was not long enough to warrant forced mowing, and it wouldn’t have happened if not for the fact that another house across town, which did have 10″ grass, shared our same street address.
So, I’m back to loving Ypsilanti, and the house if once again off the market.
7 Comments
Could this “other” house sharing the “same address” possibly be the Maynard-Lao doppelganger family? Where they’re rabid conservative christian republicans. The husband is better looking than the wife, and the baby is ugly…and unfortunately that is where my descriptive antonyms end as I realy do not know much about you and yours.
But…it could be….you never know.
And then if you go to see them and they open the door and you face each other the world will cease to exist as we know it.
So…um…could you please go over there?
…I just wanted to let you know, Chris, that it did not escape my notice how you said that in “an alternate universe,” where everything was reversed, the Mark would be more attractive than the Linette.
well dang. And here I had whole protest art installation planned for my front lawn so I could stick it to the man. ;)
Seriously though, I am glad it was all just a misunderstanding. I had convinced myself that last years lawn fiasco at my house was a misunderstanding too because both of the properties on either side of me had lawns well over a foot tall at the time and neither had house numbers so I figured when someone complained, they might have said “go to the houses *next* to ### N. Grove” and it got misinterpreted. I guess I’ll go on back to believing that and will learn to love Ypsilanti again. I still dont like the way the ordinance is worded though and would prefer some kind of notification requirement other than a public notice in the newspaper.
What are you trying to say?
To further elaborate…Dude, I just calls ’em like I see’s ’em.
Chris, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m praying that you get a severe case of Morgellon’s disease.
I guess this proves that the libertarian trolls no longer read here. Between the NSA scandal and Ypsi’s lawn care enforcement, I’d have expected them to chime in. They might have been just waiting out those topics, but I cannot believe that they’d read that you would expect to have at least $15038 after working 2920 hours @ $5.15/hr, without subsequently pointing out the taxes that would be taken and then complaining about the government in general.
Maybe the trolls learned all they could about ball shaving and moved on…