Only slightly less irritating than job hunting, and for completely different reasons entirely, is apartment hunting. Sadly, in my case, doing the one almost necessitates doing the other–see, and if Ottawa employers had just returned my phone calls we could have avoided that. If I go for the position who’s offer has just about everything to it but my signature, I’m going to end up needing to move closer than I am right now, strictly on the principle that my day’s pay would otherwise be going to transporting me to and from. Which leads me to a bit of random curiosity digging around today. And that promptly left me exactly where I was this morning.
To start, folks in Pembroke don’t advertise. At all. Unless one counts the occasional thinggy you’ll pull out of the local newspaper’s classified section. The ones that do advertise, like the one I went in to have a look at this afternoon, shouldn’t advertise. At all. It was a basement apartment, which literally was just the basement of–I’m pretty sure–someone’s house, turned into apartments (yes, plural). It had virtually no distinct living room/kitchen area to speak of, something that vaguely pretended to be a bedroom, and no closet space–what we thought was closet space turned out to actually be furnace storage space. And given I saw nothing in the place that would indicate I controled my own heat or whatever, my guess is the floor above me has it for the building. This is not how these things are supposed to work. Added on top of that, with utilities included it rang out to the tune of approximately $40 a month more than my rent right now, plus electricity, for this place–also a basement apartment, laid out much better than the one I looked at, with an actual living room and a distinct, if not exactly roomy, kitchen area. And heat I don’t need to knock on my upstairs neighbour’s door for.
I ran into similar problems in Ottawa, only with a twist–apartments in my new, post-layoff price range located not in the middle of nowhere amounted to little more than closets. My room when I went to college was bigger. I have a rule when I go apartment hunting. If I can throw something and hit my bed from the front door, it’s way too small. I could do it with a hundred percent accuracy in some of those places. Granted, if the potential job possibility in Ottawa ends up being something that doesn’t vaguely resemble nothing, that’ll be significantly less of an issue and I can safely look for something a step or two up from closet.
I’m very glad I don’t actually have to do this very often. Now, if I can just skip forward to the point when I don’t have to do this at all, that’d be awesome. Failing that, anyone have a spare paycheck they’re not using? Yeah, didn’t think so. So much for my master plan of getting rich by being lazy.