So from that day forward, I always paid at 4:55 p.m. Yes, I would wait right outside his door in my car until a few minutes before five on the first. I also started looking for a new place to rent and I ended up upgrading to a small one-bedroom about six months later.
I live in a very rural area. For example, my family lived on a twenty-acre plot growing up and we were kind of looked down upon because all the other plots in my neighborhood were forty or more acres. It was not uncommon for there to only be one house per mile.
What I was renting was a small studio cottage building on this guy’s property far enough away from the main house that it was easier to drive down there. I think it was originally used for the migrant workers that worked there during the summer, but he decided to rent out one full-time when the farming industry took a hit. It was not bad, it was cheap. I think it was somewhere around four hundred per month, maybe four hundred fifty. And my cats were happily welcomed since they were excellent mousers.
At the time my area had a three-day pay or vacate law that allowed landlords to evict after three days of non-payment. The law has since changed, but at the time, the laws heavily favored the landlords. Plus, like most places not owned by a property management company around here, it was month to month.
I didn’t really text him specifically to let him know that I would be paying on time. Since I dropped off the rent in person at his house, I usually texted him to find out when he and his wife would be home. So this time I texted him something along the lines of bank being dumb, so I’ll be there on the first with rent. What time should I come? Again, it was 2014 back then, so I don’t remember the absolute specifics.
I’m a towering crane operator in Poland and I’ve worked for quite some time on this particular construction site without any major incidents until one night when we were about to finish work for the day. Every time you finish working with the cement, the crew must clean the cement container, otherwise it gets clogged and becomes unusable for the next batch.
At that time, it was already winter, so the days were short and cold and on this particular evening, it was raining with a freezing wind and we were about to finish our shift when the crew told me to put the dirty cement container on its usual resting spot. So I asked them on the radio if they wanted to clean it first, but they completely ignored me and continued to ask me to put it down.
I asked a couple more times, but I got ignored and finally assumed they’re going to clean it tomorrow morning since the crappy weather. So we all went home. The next morning, the work started and everyone forgot about the dirty cement container until just before noon, a new batch of cement arrived.
The crew asked me to grab the container and get it up and filled, which I refused because it was clogged up with yesterday’s dry cement. I tried multiple times to communicate with them to clean that damn thing, but I got ignored again. So then the construction stopped and soon I got an angry call from the site manager as to why the construction has stopped.