It’s possible that part of my frustration to Transformers 2 is because of the drama we’ve been having over our condo. Let’s cut out the problems with our house in St. Louis still not being sold after two years and being threatened with a lawsuit over it (long story) and focus on the current situation.

So we moved to a condo late last year, when the last place we lived at didn’t have an adequate explanation for why we found bullet casings outside our window. The condo is owned by one person (we’ll call him Albert), who hired a rental firm (which we’ll call Bravo Rental) to rent the place to us and manage the finances. The condo is actually part of a company that runs the entire community — let’s say they’re Cosmic Condos. Cosmic Condos handles things like security, condo area rules, making sure people follow the rules, and so on. All Brave Rental does is handle our rent and pay fees to Cosmic Condo, as well as being middle-management between us and the owner.

Earlier this year, we started getting letters from legal firms to our address, but directed to someone who doesn’t live here. A lot of letters. After we sent some back and threw out others, Michelle finally called the law firm to tell them that they have the wrong place. Michelle got threatened by the law firm over mail fraud (even though all she did was Google the address and start asking questions), so she contacted the second law firm. That one confirmed that the condo was being foreclosed on, and we might be asked to leave in April on seven day’s notice.

So Michelle contacted both Bravo and Cosmic to find out what’s going on, and there’s some drama around that. The day of foreclosure comes and goes, and we’re already starting to get a home loan in case we have to move out on short notice. Eventually Bravo tells us that they’ve sorted out the condo fees, which gets the immediate threat out of the way, but we’re still getting things in order. Maybe we can buy the condo ourselves, or find another condo in the complex, or something. It’s still tense, but we’re in a better situation.

Over time, we see that some of the condo owners have clickers for the gate instead of cards like we do, which means they don’t have to wait at the intercom to open the gate. Michelle calls Cosmo to see if we could get a clicker, since the fees have been handled. Instead, not only do we not get the clicker, but we were told that the fees weren’t covered. This was followed up by a letter telling us that we had ten days from the day of the letter (which, of course, took four days to get from office to us, even though the office is right down the street) to pay our fees, or Cosmic would start towing our cars at our expense.

Irate, Michelle started calling around. Bravo said that they had paid the fees, but Cosmic claimed that they hadn’t, and was holding us as the resident accountable (even though we don’t own the condo). Clearly, someone was lying or didn’t have all the facts. Since once again we were given short notice to deal with someone else’s problem.

Now, Bravo did eventually calls us back and say that they talked to Albert, and the owner is willing to let us out of our lease and return our deposit while they sort out the problem with Cosmic. Cosmic is still claiming that we need to pay the fee, and tells us that we can pay our rent directly to them to cover the rent — which means that we’re paying someone else’s fees, and we essentially stop paying Bravo, who are the people we’re contractually obligated to.

So Michelle spent most of the past week vetting a variety of apartments and rental townhomes in the nearby area, and came up with a shortlist of five, which we looked at on Saturday. We have one that we’ve put in an application for and have a tentative move-in date for July 11, but if that falls through we have a back-up plan.

However, that does mean that I’ve moved five times in less than two years, and the last two have been because the owners of the places we’ve rented from have been so frustrating that moving on short notice was preferable to staying where we were.