The Reluctant Rock

As soon as we bought our first place, I made sure to get onto the board of the HOA. Home Owner's Associations are pretty ubiquitous around here. Probably because if you're home isn't in one, your neighbor will, without fail, paint their house an eye searing shade of sunshine yellow accompanied by a nauseating teal trim. (I've seen it. On more than one occasion, in fact)

In general, I don't much care for HOAs. I can see how they are a necessary evil. But I've also seen the pure, unadulterated evil side of them. Not only on the "HOA Hall Of Shame" segment that airs on our local news. You see, The Husband and I had our wedding reception in my parent's newly renovated backyard. (more of under the covered patio and spilling into the house as it absolutely poured on my wedding day- extra good luck) The hassle of dealing with my parent's HOA fully soured me to the whole institution. It seemed like the board went out of their way to make my wedding as difficult to plan and execute as possible. There were numerous occasions in which I contemplated tracking down the homes of the board members and going Bridezilla on them.

So when the nomination forms for a seat in our Association came in the mail, I signed myself up. I won that chair by two whole votes. (Probably my own and a neighbor friend of mine) I thought I would just go to quarterly meetings, try and be the voice of reason, and then be done with it.

This turned out to be vastly unrealistic. Apparently, the old addage is true: There's always ONE. As in, there's always one (or in my case three) homeowners that just can't chill out. No, they have to email me constantly about their neighbor putting their trash out in bags... not in cans! The NERVE! Or one that comes to every single meeting to inform us that there are a couple weeds growing in a common area- and it makes the entire community look like the ghetto of East St. Louis. (I've driven by this area on numerous occasions- it looks perfectly fine to me!) So dealing with the crazies is certainly at least a part time job in itself.

Then there's the AP invoices. That all need to be approved by me. I have to login to the community site, then login as an administrator, then approve the invoice, then "make sure" I intended on approving the invoice and click YES! FREAKING APPROVE THE DARNED INVOICE ALREADY! It's all really annoying. And way more than I bargained for. Yet I do it. Because I don't want our community to get out of hand and end up spotlighted in the ominous HOA Hall Of Shame.

I think I do a lot for these homeowners. Most of them are oblivious, and some just outright couldn't give a duck's tailfeather what goes on. Fine, whatever.

HOWEVER. We have a problem. Every once in a while (actually more often than one would think) the garbage men completely skip over our subdivision and leave us with stinky trash sitting out on the curb. So, without fail, I dial up the trash company (I have it programmed into my phone- that's how often this happens) and I request they come back and pick up the gosh darned trash. Which they do. Usually the very same day.

This week, the trash cans all sat out, uncollected. I meant to go through the whole drill again and call them up, but my week got insanely busy and it didn't happen. Besides, I thought to myself, all somebody has to do is look up the number- on the web, in the phonebook, on a billing statement, wherever- and give them a head's up.

Well, out of the seventy or so homeowners, NOBODY did anything. The trash has sat out there all week. And that makes my blood boil. SERIOUSLY?! No one can lift a finger about this? You're all just sooo busy, eh? This rage is compounded with the fact that most of the residents in our neighborhood are retirees... who have nothing else to do but walk their dogs, and I'm assuming, play some shuffleboard.

So I've let it sit until our regularly scheduled trash pick up day. TAKE THAT people who clearly don't give a hoot about timely waste removal!