Saturday July 3, 2004
Okay, so I've been taking the day off from stress. Reading.
Poking around on the web to see if anyone has reverse-engineered Sony's OpenMG application or the USB protocol they use so I can copy my orginal recordings from MD to PC (and then convert from ATRAC to wav) instead of re-recording them in real time through my sound card - Ugh! Some folks are apparently making a bit of headway, but aren't there yet. Sigh
Delved very briefly into the Tenant Protection Act and got thoroughly disgusted by the fact that neither the html nor the Word versions published online have a Table of Contents with page numbers, so I made my own copy with numbers. Now I won't be flipping through sixty some pages when I need to locate the wording of something I'm arguing about.
And chuckled over something the landlord did during the mediation on Wednesday. Way back in December 2002, I gave them a cheque for the last month's rent. For mysterious reasons, the cheque was never negotiated. In June 2003, the deposit was stipulated by the Tribunal to have been paid because they couldn't prove otherwise.
But during the 'negotiations' this past week, they first offered a package that included the deposit in the calculations. Once my side had accepted that that may be okay with us, their next move was to remove the deposit from the calculations saying I'd never paid it. I stated that it had been stipulated as paid earlier.
Here's the part that makes me laugh. Tell me if you think I'm just off balance or if it strikes you as hilarious too. The cat's no fun - she doesn't get it at all. And I think I confused my friend when I tried to explain it the other day.
With a rather agressive flourish the landlord holds up a letter I wrote that has the cheque attached to the bottom of it, thrusts it in my direction and says: "It was never paid."
So I had to say: "That looks like a cheque I wrote. Which means I did pay it."
His attitude and manner suggested that somehow I was at fault for his not negotiating the cheque before it was stale-dated.
Apparently there are no rules in mediation sessions. The Tribunal's own Rules state that nothing said there can be later used in the hearing. So you can be as outrageously inane as you wish.
The picture of his triumphant presentation of supposed evidence of my failure to pay that only proves he didn't bother to cash it is something I will remember the next time I'm up against him in court and I need to reduce my stress level.
I am still convinced that the fact the Tribunal stipulated it had been paid in the first hearing (June 2003) and that during the October 2003 hearing it was included in the calculations of what I owed plus the fact that they'd had to agree during that hearing that the interest I'd deducted from the August rent was correct means they can't change their minds now.
It'll be interesting to see if they bring it up at the next hearing, huh? I'm betting they don't want the Tribunal to know why they didn't get the deposit more than they want the money. Oh, and the package I filed with the Tribunal includes letters I wrote reminding them to negotiate the cheque. There's just no helping some people.
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