I’m a bad person

So we bought a condo not quite a year ago. Due to the vagaries of the Boston real estate market, though we were members of the condo association from day one, the association itself has been run by the development company that bought our building, renovated the crappy apartments into moderately crappy condos, and sold it to us. We’ll call the company ReverSide.

ReverSide sucks. They treated us like tenants in a crappy tenemant, not like owners. They ignored reasonable requests and frequently sent in contractors to do stuff to the common area without mentioning it to us, much less asking our okay. Despite frequent and persistant requests from all the owners they refused to have a condo meeting for more than a year. They just sucked. In particular, a woman named Jennifer N. sucked. She was our point person and refused to answer emails or phone messages.

After months of asking for one particular thing to be done (which had to do with them as developers, not as condo “managers”), I finally wrote a very stern email last week. It was polite, excruciatingly polite, but very firm. Their failure to do what we told them to was waking my daughter up from naps, damnit. I admitted I was tired and cranky in the note, but was pretty damned firm.

Jennifer N. wrote back a snippy little email with the oh-so condescending phrase that “when you take over as a trustee, you’ll find…”

I wrote an even more polite, even more stern email back to her, respectfully disagreeing.

She called my husband! She didn’t call me or even the house. She called my husband to complain about me!

Apparently she was sniffly and felt that I was offering unwarranted personal attacks on her!  That she couldn’t understand why we were unhappy with ReverSide, we had never complained before! At the meeting that time, I had served her cookies! She couldn’t understand this angry and aggressive tone out of left field!

The Husband basically said, “We think you guys are terrible and we’ve been very unhappy and very vocal about being unhappy and I don’t know why you’re surprised.” And she started, very softly on the other end of the phone, to cry.

I made a woman cry. And I’m glad. Hell, I’m gleeful!

And I feel a little bad that I feel so glad that I made this woman cry. Clearly she’s not actively evil, just Biblically incompetent. (She wrote me a whiny email, after calling the husband, where she sounded legitimately amazed that we weren’t happy with ReverSide.) I shouldn’t be so damned happy that I made this poor, clearly stupid woman cry.

But I am. And I’m okay with that.