My landlady, long ago, extended her house to include an upstairs. A living room rests over the garage and behind it two bedrooms and a bathroom sit above the living room and kitchen of the ground floor. I'm renting out one of the bedrooms and another tenant rents the other. The construction of an exterior stairway, placed alongside the garage allows for us to come and go through a side-gate without interrupting my landlady. Since I am still young enough to spend the occasional late night of anarchic drinking in town, I find this arrangement mutually beneficial, as my fashionably extra-late return home does not have to wake her.
Just last week she told me that she has decided to refinance her mortgage. Consequently, the bank will be sending an inspector. Under ordinary circumstances, I might not care, but this inspection complicates the relationship that I have with my landlady. Her son, who acts as a handyman, will stop by this weekend to take the stove out of the upstairs kitchenette that I share with the other tenant. He will also remove the partition that currently covers the indoor stairway between the two floors, lowering our mutual privacy.
Now why should he take away the stove and stairway cover? I did not sign on an a tenant to be so rudely interrupted. When I queried about the unnecessary disruption, I found out that she, in her sweet, elderly way, acts in a dark and shadowy market, subverting government and its accessory taxation. She rents out part of her home <cue revealing music> without a license!
Apparently, the city has declared a house with two stoves illegal. That body politic also declared the renting out of a room, activity requiring a license. I bet some hotel cartel or renters association put them up to it. Or perhaps they just think that they are keeping me "safe from exploitation". The government officiates probably think that my 80-plus yr old landlady, menacingly threatens society as she ambles around in her walker, wringing her hands over of all the rent money I voluntarily agreed to pay. Because if they ever found out she operates without a license, or that her house has a fire-hazard second stove in the upstairs kitchen, all manner of fines and levies would surely find their way into her mailbox.
Just who do these government thugs think they are? What right do they possess? They threaten an old lady, who's just trying to scrounge up some extra funds by renting out space she's no longer able to use, and expect me to thank them? I hate those guys.
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