Homeowner's Dissociation

Next week is my first annual homeowner's association meeting. I’m oddly excited. I went to one a few months ago and was so exciting to be pretending to be involved in where all my exorbitant home owner fees go that I spent most of the time patting myself of the back and planning what kind of selfish things I would now allow myself to do after making the effort to go to this meeting.

There’s like 400 units in my complex, so I had wrongly assumed the meeting would be well attended by yuppie downtowners like me, who burst through the doors in fur coats with little cocker spaniels in matching sweaters, who would discretely find a place to sit with an open seat next to it for all their tiaras and diamonds. These are always the type of people I assume live in my building, and that’s only because of the crazy blinged out cars I see parked in our structure. We have valet parking in my building. (Ok before you start groaning, it’s mandatory because of how tight the parking is and we pay up the wazoo for it. Did I just say “up the wazoo?”) The little 18 year old valets have apparently been instructed to park all the fancy cars in the front. Maybe for the intimidation factor, maybe so you’re put in your proper place when you drive up in your Ford Focus. But the cars in the front area are crazy. There are a couple Corvettes and Porches and probably plenty of other fancy pants cars that I don’t even know the names of. You can imagine how it goes when I roll up in my dirty Civic. Whichever acne-prone valet kid comes to park my car always looks a little sad because he knows he’s going to have to go park my car on the bottom floor in the corner, just to the left of the dumpster, back where no one will see it.

But anyway, back to this Homeowner meeting. I’ll fill all you non-homeowning kids in on our cool lingo now so I don’t have to keep writing our Homeowners. All us home-owning, too-cool-for-school types call home owner associations your “HOA.” “How’s the HOA doing, Bob?” “Oh, it’s going.” Or my personal favorite: “How about the SOB who runs our HOA?” “I know. WTF is his deal?” Then you’re super cool because you’ve just used like three acronyms and sound like a total dork.

The only reason I went to the HOA meeting last time was because I somehow got blind carbon copied on an angry email from an irate neighbor of mine, who I’ve never met and don’t plan to. His use of grammar was appalling (this coming from a girl who just ended her last sentence with a preposition) and he sounded completely stupid in his list of grievances to our HOA president, who was apparently out to lunch and never responded, which only made Johnny McNeedstoTakeaGrammarCourse even madder. This guy was using run-on sentences and commas like they were going out of style. He complained about our mail room, a chipped tile outside the elevator, the girl who drives the dirty Civic (oh crap), the dogs who poops on his doormat, and, to quote, “the unfortunate number of young people who have decided upon the horrific institution of marriage in our building.” Whoa! Someone had some Bitter-O’s for breakfast. He claimed that people are receiving too many packages because there are too many married couples in the building and then our mail room looks ugly. He finished by pointedly assuring our HOA president that he will be present at that night’s meeting to talk about the issues.

When I finished reading this email, I blinked a few times, closed my jaw from the agape pose, and quickly cleared that night’s schedule so I could attend the meeting of all meetings. This meeting was going to make the other meetings look like 4th Grade student senate. This would be a smack-down meeting that I would be telling my children about. There was going to be some HOA ass-kicking tonight! And I had ring-side seats.

So I show up to the meeting, way too eager and early, only to find that it is in our North Lobby, and involved about a dozen folding chairs and about six total attendees. I was appalled. The infamous mail room (defendant #408) was right next to our meeting site, along with the elevators, the doors to the street, and a few people’s condo doors. And some mastermind on the HOA decided to plan this meeting at 5:30. So basically the entire condo walked through the meeting while coming home from work, slamming doors, getting in elevators, coming back to check their mail, walk their dogs, or pick up their pizza that was being delivered. Some guy actually walked through the meeting to go on a date and came back two hours later with the same girl, and had the awkward first date goodbye two feet away from our meeting. Most of the people were looking at our sad little gathering as though it were some type of new club that was trying to get its footing.

The HOA board looked very un-menacing and included a skinny tall guy who shook noticeably throughout the whole meeting, a woman who was shaped like a squash and a wiry little girl who looked like she could be the squash girl’s snack. One of them mentioned that our illustrious HOA president, whom I had yet to meet, was going to be late because he had class. Class? Excuse me? Is this kid in high school? Is he going to be studying for his chemistry final when we need to be negotiating on Earthquake insurance? Is he going to blow our HOA bank account on Pokemon cards and chewing gum? I have clearly been out of the HOA loop for too long.

The meeting dragged on about nothing for like an hour and I realized Johnny Email-Complainer wasn’t saying a word! I was so disappointed. I recognized who he was right away because he looked nerdy and bitter and sat in the corner.

After like 90 minutes of boringness, the president finally arrived. I think he came in on a Razor scooter and he had a backpack on when he sat down. Holy Crap, he really is like my age. Turns out he’s in law school, but still he’s like 24 at most. How weird is that? I immediately judged him and assumed he was only our HOA president so he could put it on his resume or something, but he actually was regulating during the meeting and by the end of it, I was wondering in what unit this studly young leader parks his scooter.

The meeting as a whole was pretty disappointing though. Nothing was thrown, no one threatened to move out or call in their lawyers. And all the pizza being delivered just made me hungry. The HOA president didn’t ask me out, he must be gay. Although I decided it was for the best because if I started getting the nice parking, got my windows washed more then twice a year, and the carpet outside my door was vacuumed twice a day, people might start talking.