Some Probing Questions to Ask Yourself to Help You Determine if You Might be Living in Government-Subsidized Public Housing for Cripples

Do you suspect that you (or someone you love) might be living in government-subsidized public housing for cripples? I have developed a series of probing questions, based on my own experience, that you can ask yourself to help you determine whether or not you are indeed living in government-subsidized public housing for cripples. Here are a few:

Probing question 1: Do fire trucks roar up to your building several times a week? When I moved into government-subsidized public housing for cripples about 30 years ago, legend had it that when the building opened two years earlier, the woman in apartment 8 called 911 nearly every day. A brigade of firefighters would burst into her apartment, only to find that she called because the toilet was clogged or she couldn’t get a jar open or something like that. I guess somebody eventually broke her of that habit before the fire department painted a big black X on the building and placed us all on the no-call list.

Probing question 2: Do the Three Stooges Plumbers show up to remodel your leaking bathroom, remove your toilet and then disappear for five days, literally leaving you without a pot to piss in? The non-profit company that owned and operated our government subsidized public housing building for cripples always hired lowest-bidder contractors, which meant we ended up with contractors like the Three Stooges Plumbers. There was severe water damage throughout the building on the ceilings beneath everyone’s roll-in shower. So one day these plumbers scurried in, removed and hauled away my toilet and bathroom floor tiles and scurried out. And they didn’t return five days. Who knows where they went? Maybe a higher-paying job came along or maybe one of them got his head stuck in a drainpipe or something and it took the others five days to pry him out

Probing question 3: Is the lowest-bid contractor guy management hired to remove snow only available in July? Sometimes a ton of snow fell and thus we cripples were pretty much stuck inside our government-subsidized public housing building for cripples until the guy management hired to dig us out came around. Sometimes he wouldn’t arrive for days either. Once when I finally saw him out there plowing the parking lot I went out to ask what took him so long. He shrugged and said, “It’s my busy season. There’s a lot of snow.” I thought about taking him to court and maybe by August I could get an injunction ordering him to immediately remove the snow.

Probing question 4: Is black water that smells like rotten eggs oozing out from under your bathroom door? One day I was sitting home just minding my own damn business when all of a sudden I smelled rotten eggs. I saw a black puddle oozing out from under my closed bathroom door. I swear, it looked as if the bloody, black-and-white shower murder from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho had just occurred in my bathroom. It turned out to be black water bubbling up from my roll-in shower drain and soon it flooded my kitchen. Oh shit, I said to myself. Here comes another lowest-bid contractor.

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you could very well be living in government-subsidized public housing for cripples. If so, consult a professional.


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