EP. 1
Homeless Entrepreneurism
It's early 2015.
We got back home one evening and noticed a bright sticker on our door. It was an eviction notice.
The real estate agent had pulled a fast one.
This is how.
After months of living at this apartment, we didn’t have a mailbox key. If anything was placed directly in the mailbox, it was neither visible nor accessible.
There had been an exhaustive list of problems in dealing with this agency. The debit of an incorrect & substantial amount of rent from our bank account being the worst of them.
The agent never picked up calls, and we kept getting bounced around between admin and accounting in trying to get our money reimbursed.
After screwing around back & forth via emails for weeks, we had enough. We cancelled further payments from the account in question.
We decide that unless the issue got resolved, we wouldn't pay another dime. The agent, of course, instead of reconciling the ledger, sneakily decided to evict us.
He knew we didn’t have a mailbox key — the rascal had not fixed this issue in months — yet the 'notice of hearing' was dropped into the box.
The legal hearing date came and passed (unbeknown to us), and the verdict was delivered due to non-attendance. It wasn't just an eviction, we were blacklisted from renting a home for a few years hence.
We tried to track down the owner of the apartment in the couple of weeks we had remaining here, only to find, the place was owned by some family trust. With the trust office itself being run from the premises of a faceless corp, it was all a dark web.
After speaking with a couple of lawyers, the conclusion was that a fighting the agent wouldn't compensate much. They said the system was flawed at base level.
For us it wasn’t so straight forward; our struggle was as much on principle as it was situational.
To these agencies you are just a number in the system, or better known by your technical status: Pond Scum. There is no humanity to understand that on the other side of their screw ups, people can be left with no roof over their heads.
The uncomfortable truth is that if the threat of violence wasn't just the domain of the state, people across certain professions wouldn't antagonize fellow humans this much. It allows the cowards to hide behind a wall and attack others, knowing no one can hurt them back.
But we delivered a small payback by changing the main door lock and throwing the keys in the river. The apartment board rules would prevent the agent or owners from breaking in, and they'd endure a painful process in getting a new door lock approved by the convoluted building management.
Overall we decided its best for us to move on from this dirty process and focus on the big picture: To figure out what Zen Black would bring to life.
We were, in hindsight, using positivity to cover up a tricky situation, while the ripple effects couldn't yet be foreseen.
We packed up & moved our furniture into a storage unit. This was tough. It was a brutally hot summer and I was still not in a position to lift heavy objects due to the hernia.
I had to quickly figure out how to move things without really lifting. A series of angles, weight distribution, and a skater dolly, to allow me to do things with restricted movement and without strain.
Most of my personal journey has been about ‘not letting’ extreme restriction suffocate the life out of me. There is a harsh emotional, physical and spiritual price to pay for having to constantly outdo yourself.
But on the inverse, there is a level of resourcefulness that you get to tap into, which expands you like nothing else. If one survives this long enough, the kinds of opportunity one has access to then has no limit.
Meanwhile in the story, more madness was about to ensue.
hoarders and liars
A week before we left our apartment, we crossed paths with a couple we’d known for a while.
It turned out they were in-between homes and looking for a new place to rent. With our apartment now being pretty much empty, we let them stay at our house for the final week.
A couple of days before we were all supposed to move out, they got approved for a rental. Since they knew our situation they made us an offer: To sign the contract in their name as long as we shared the rental costs with them.
The truth is, we had not wanted to share a space with anyone, but we were in a pickle here. The offer turned up at a relevant time, so we thought: Let’s see how it works out for a couple of months?
They also requested to temporarily borrow all the furniture from our storage unit, while they looked for something of their own after moving in. When we asked them how much of their own stuff there was to move in, they said just a few pieces of art work and some clothes.
We agreed about lending our furniture, as long the guy did all the heavy lifting. The girl, well, she had one prosthetic leg.
Move-in day came along and it was another hot day. While waiting for them at the storage unit, we got a late call from the dude. He said that he's unable to get his work shift covered, so he won’t be able to join us until much later.
Well, since the moving van was already paid for by-the-hour, we had to proceed with moving the furniture ourselves. Déjà vu! Something didn’t seem right, but we just wanted to get this out of the way.
When we arrived at the destination, there was no access for the van into the main carpark. They had carelessly forgotten to mention the important detail of the height-restriction.
We had to now pull over on a busy main street, and carry things into the apartment through a longer route and multiple sets of stairs, instead of the straightforward access from the apartment carpark.
The icing on the cake was when we entered the house. It was a God-awful mess! It wasn’t just clothes and so called "artwork" they'd brought with them; the house was filled to the brim with useless crap.
If we brought any of our furniture in, there would be no room left to move!
Turned out they were dirty hoarders and liars! We had to make a spot decision to not move in with these idiots.
We had to run the entire process in reverse now: Move things all the way back to the storage centre in stifling heat, and reorganize it all to fit back inside our tiny unit.
Not sure how we managed this insane task, but recurring moments like these (over the years) got us tapping into some kind of beast mode, where we'd just turn relentless until the job got done.
We were fortunate to find an Airbnb that same night at extremely short notice.
Following this, we crashed pretty hard.
into the unknown
Summer time was peak season for accommodation, so limited availability had us moving every few days to a different Airbnb. This was not only inconvenient for mental stability, it was costing us in extra service fees with every new booking.
But a few weeks on we finally found a proper place to rent, from folks who seemed like they were a decent family.
On the surface everything looked fine, but when we collected the keys I felt an intuitive nudge to play it safe. I told my partner that we’d only bring our furniture into the house a couple of days after moving in.
It took only one night in the house to reveal the truth about why the owner’s sister (the previous tenant) had moved out.
They had conveniently decided not to mention about the lunatic aggressive alcoholic who lived next door. His spiel was booming techno tracks, howling, and banging on walls whilst out of his mind after midnight.
It's more common than one would think across society, that people just want to push transactions across the line to get their money, despite knowing there is something seriously wrong in their offering.
There was little to do the next morning but return the keys, and demanded our money back.
The forced refund was no solace for us because this was turning into an insane loop. 3 more weird experiences followed the above incident: of things falling apart at the last moment before our move in.
It led to that decision that it was time to stop trying so hard to secure a roof over our heads. Life was ruthlessly throwing obstacles in our way, and we were beginning to sense that these obstacles were not to be surmounted, but instead they were to be listened to.
On some level, we listened.
We picked up a rental car and took a drive down to a little beach town for a change of scenery.
In the middle of our journey the weather turned into a crazy thunderous affair.
By the time we arrived into the town, everything was shut down due to the wild winds. We were left with no choice but to sleep in the car, while the weather wrecked havoc on the outside.