Don’t you hate it when you go away for the holidays, and you come back to a disaster? That’s what happened to Don Levy of Albany. I don’t know Don personally, though I did see him once in a Rite Aid downtown, but we are friends on Facebook.
Returning on the Greyhound from his mom’s house the Tuesday after Christmas, he found a note from his landlord, NGB Management, that they had changed the lock to his apartment. He had to wait well over an hour to receive new keys. He realized SOMETHING was when he saw a board nailed onto the wall, as shown in this photo he took.
Don, who works for the NYC Comptroller’s office, was told there had been a fire in the apartment next door on Christmas morning, and the fire department had to shut off the electricity to both apartments. He was informed that the fire department deemed his place uninhabitable, though he had no smoke damage.
The place was admittedly messy; Don had suffered a cold the week before, but it was subsequently cleaned up by him and his friends.
The problem now is that the landlord claims that the fire department has to inspect the apartment before they can turn on the power. Conversely, the fire department tells him, logically, that it’s the landlord’s responsibility to get the power turned on. National Grid says the same way thing. He waits, increasingly impatiently, for the landlord to do his job.
The result is that Don was living in a hotel room, at his own expense, for several days, before finding friends to crash with. He is currently weighing his legal options as well as looking for another apartment.
Don is appreciative of folks such as Sean McLaughlin and Richard LaJoy, who have helped him out. But he is anxious to be in his own place again.
I hope he at least gets some fodder for his writings. Don Levy is a local poet who also writes a book blog for Albany Poets.
More than likely the delays are not the landlord’s fault. National Grid’s corporate bureaucracy is nightmarish, I can tell you plenty of horror stories trying to get them to do what they are supposed to. The City of Albany’s electrical inspector recently told me that he no longer wastes time with them, he calls them exactly once and then waits for more people to get angry at them before he tries to contact them again.