Okay. It's time. Here's the deal.
I, Gremlin, AKA myriad other professional names--some even relevant to this matter--am hereby announcing, in this publicly-accessible medium, my intent to sue.
That's probably not news, as such. But, just to make it all nice and official.
There's the begged question [the other one, in addition to Why in the Living Hell Are WorstPacific Stupid Enough to Allow Me the Opportunity to Sue Them into Extinction in the First Place], of course, which is: Why Now.
That is to ask: why, after two months of relentless suck, and after two years of passive suck, would I choose this moment, of all moments, to announce my intent to sue. Instead of answering the question outright, I have a prepared Mike Brady Parable to better explain it all.
Once upon a time, when the grass was greener and those massive Snickers Bars were twenty-five cents, and computers were evolving into sixty-four-kilobyte monsters of processing power...actually, the exact date is immaterial, since it's a parable. I'll start over.
Last Tuesday, after fifty-odd years of marriage, a woman stood before a judge in divorce court, petitioning for a decree of dissolution.
The judge, curious, asked the woman: why, after fifty-two years of marriage, when she had five grown children, who had seventeen children of their own, and while she owned fifty percent of a modest house, one of the cars, and half the interest in Amway and SMC turnkeys...why, after all this time, would this woman choose this moment in eternity to divorce her husband.
'Because,' the woman answered simply and exactly, 'enough is enough.'
I'm now announcing my intent because enough is enough. That it's more than enough, by veritable scads, is immaterial. I've had all I can take, and I can'st takes no more.
That's pretty well it, really. Sure, there were new bits of suck yesterday, but only in the chronological sense. On Wednesday, a guy came in here to 'fix' things, which equated to little more than getting paint onto my three-thousand-dollar trenchcoat and tossing large chunks of my ceiling, once again, into my fucking bathtub. On Thursday, another guy came in here to tear apart the ceiling the Wednesday guy had installed, since he'd installed it over a running leak, causing it to become saturated and swollen; the Thursday guy then tore out the new ceiling and threw it, once yet again, into my fucking bathtub, which I'd just cleaned out, once yet more again, so I could take a bath.
I'm greedy that way. Exorbitant though it must sound, I like to take at least one bath per day. Preferably in a tub devoid enough of asbestos to make me cleaner than I had been, instead of dirtier.
So, now there's yet more ceiling drywall and asbestos and black mould in my tub. I could go clean it out again, but I'd prefer to sit here for a bit, announcing my intent.
Because, you see, enough is enough.
Not because someone threw a ceiling in my tub yesterday. Or the day before. Or the week before that. Or all the times in the last several weeks this has been done.
Not because the carpet I was explicitly forbidden to get out of my way while mopping up hundreds of gallons of water with a damned sponge is riddled with a migratory black mould.
Not because I already had to call in the Neighbourhood Liaisons way back in the middle of May, a week after first being told by these stupid fucking morons that I was overreacting about the damned deluge invading the entirety of my flat.
Not because, since getting the Neighbourhood Liaisons, Fire Marshal, police, gas company, et al out here in the middle of May, no one has bothered to do anything of permanent use to this place at all.
Not because, while I average two or three headaches per month in general history, that's moved up to three or four per week since I moved into this malebolgian fucking oubliette.
Not because Hunter has become terrified of the doorbell, and paranoid that, since I've displayed the audacity to complain about the state of the place I lease, I'm going to get us evicted from this hellhole for deigning to express a dissatisfaction respecting its maintenance.
Not because I have a seventy-seven-megabyte .wma file, compressed to radio quality, of my phone calling the 'emergency number' [a single pager which occasionally ends up in the same zipcode, at night, as anyone who could prove even remotely useful in an actual emergency], punching in my number to be called back as quickly as idiotically possible, ringing off, and waiting...and waiting some more...and some more after that...and the recording still ticks off the seconds...and the minutes...and the hours...until, finally, the office open at eight in the morning, and fail utterly to call me back even then...and then I call the office...and the final three minutes of this massive file of nearly-pure silence is the primary landlord assuring me that A) they know about the flood caused by the ruptured pipes caused by their criminal negligence, B) they can't be held responsible for the direct effects of their criminal negligence, and C) they can't allow me to remove the carpet in order to more effectively sponge up the hundreds of gallons of water I'm accumulating per day because this fifty-dollar segment of antiquated utility carpet is far too desperately more important to them than I or my millions of dollars in personal possessions could ever be, and, of course, D) they still know about the flood and it's tragically distasteful of me to continue to beleaguer them with the details of the flood since they really can't be bothered to care--and, amusingly enough, E) they can't get anything accomplished any faster than the speed of suck, even if I were to call in the Neighbourhood Liaisons and the Fire Marshal and the police and the gas company et al and I could prove that assertion all by myself by calling them anyway but really it wouldn't do any good ever at all because there was no way to move faster than the speed of suck--an assertion I did, in fact, test, and repudiate all to hell, insofar as all these people were able to scare WorstPacific badly enough to fix the few things on the list in just over the allotted twenty-four hours.
Not because the carpet I couldn't be allowed to remove in order to save a huge percentage of my stuff, as recorded in this file, has since become an abandoned mouldfarm communicating between my asbestos-filled bathtub and my asbestos-littered livingroom.
Not because, in the event that Hunter and I ever managed to escape this place, the average IQ for the building would be instantly halved.
Not because Hunter is afraid to step outside, due to the habits of the retarded bigots who misidentify her as a satanic jew. Loudly. With malice.
Not because these horrid little mutants leave trace evidence of malicious mischief in the pollen covering my car as they touch, sit upon, and crawl atop it all day and all night.
Not because of any of that. But because of all of that. Because enough is enough.
Also, because of this:

In fact: because of that more than any other single thing. Because, for the JPEG Impaired:

Rental Agreement Addendum
Asbestos Addendum

Resident: [GREMLIN (they managed to misspell the name under which my publisher leased this place anyway)] Unit: 12265

An assessment of this apartment community was undertaken to determine if [sic] any of the building material consists of asbestos. Asbestos is a material, [sic] which has been widely used in construction for fire proofing [sic], insulation and [sic] acoustical purposes. As a result of our assessment, some asbestos material was found in the spray applied [sic] acoustical ceiling in the buildings. While the acoustical ceiling remains intact, they [sic] pose NO heath threats. Damaged asbestos may pose a health threat.

Certain precautions and maintenance procedures have been established for the apartments to ensure the materials containing asbestos are not disturbed or handled by untrained persons [sic]. Therefore, all maintenance and repairs concerning asbestos contained [sic] materials must be performed by trained personnel. We request your cooperation so we may provide a safe environment for you and all our residents.

The following rules must be observed:

DO NOT	Disturb the ceiling by drilling holes, sweeping cobwebs, etc [sic]. If you accidentally cause the sprayed ceiling to become loose and/or it becomes dislodged from the ceiling, do not touch the ceiling and [sic] call our maintenance personnel.
DO NOT	Drill, sand, saw, grind [sic] or remove any type of floor covering [sic] tile or linoleum.
DO	Obtain written permission from the Resident Manager prior to perform [sic] any maintenance or repair activities in your apartment or the apartment complex.
DO	Call maintenance personnel to perform any activities for you, which may otherwise effect [sic] the acoustical spray on the ceiling.
DO	Report any water leaks or ceiling damage to the Resident Manager.

Resident agrees to comply with the aforementioned rules. If the aforementioned rules are violated and as a result an asbestos repair is deemed necessary, the resident may be charged for any work performed.

Resident understands that an asbestos repair may occur at some point of his/her [sic] residency [sic] at Meadow Lark. In such event at Landlords [sic] cost, Resident agrees to move to a fully furnished [sic] apartment at the community, or to a nearby hotel/motel [sic] of the Landlord's choice for the period it takes to complete the repair.

So. Having NOT disturbed the ceiling, and having NOT drilled the thing, and having called these twerps to perform any activities for me, and having reported any water leaks and ceiling damage...having followed these rules, I still live in a flat with asbestos in my fucking tub and landlords who make it clear that calling them to report water and damage is not only really rude of me, but of no concern to them, since the problem remains fully that of myself and my stuff.
So. Enough is enough.
I've updated WorstPacific.com now with a few new snaps of the suck. My next project, if the asbestos doesn't kill me before the headaches do, will be to reformat the whole thing into something more practical than the simple main.asp currently there. And, my next project after that is to offer this case to a few lawyers--some already on retainer [my spraypainted trenchcoat is covered by my insurance] and some to which I've been recommended due to their specialised intralegal fields, such as engineering, real estate, contract law, and personal injury and property damage and loss. Basically a damned army.
Which, I'll admit, is a bit like using a GameShark on SimCity2000. Unless you've discovered a way to suck at SimCity2000. In which case you should never play it without a lot of lawyers. Or something.
In any case, my thinking is that this Asbestos Addendum, along with hundreds of snaps of the suck, along with hours of fullmotion video of the suck, along with the Neighbourhood Liaison's findings about the suck, along with eyewitnesses to the suck, along with the existence of homosapiens and the existence of money, should be enough to convince WorstPacific Investments that adding in a jury and the media to this recipe would be a good way to go bankrupt in about three and a half minutes. Just a hunch.
Which has nothing either way to do with my contemplation of a nonfiction and nonplussed book [not unlike NotS was] documenting the suck from start to finish. The images alone are good for two hundred pages. And the fact that the fact that I'm a novelist is a fact that these idiots factually knew two factual years ago shows, in fact, that these idiots had all the factual data required to predict that pushing me to conclude that enough was enough was effectively their own suicide.
For all that, I feel like a slight bully for GameSharking at these intellectual infants, even after all this suck. But...what can I say: enough's enough. This place is going to kill one of us. I can live with the dead party being WorstPacific. You can't save everyone. Particularly those with evident corporate suicidal ideation.
Also, let's be realistic here. I'm a fucking badguy. I always was. And they should have conjectured that the first time they witnessed me wearing leather jeans.
For the record, I maintain my original offer, from way back in May. I'm perfectly willing to settle out of court for US$500,000. But I have some doubts that WorstPacific are smart enough to offer that nominal sum. In all likelihood, they'll force me to go official with this, which insult necessarily raises my expected award by an order of magnitude.
More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.