HOA Bitterness

When I walked into the HOA meeting.

I find meetings to be pretty much the worst part of living. I can put up with a lot of things, like an onion sliver on my pizza, or someone talking way too much. This is not to say I wouldn’t complain about them endlessly, I’m just saying I could put up with them for a little bit.

Meetings I cannot. I simply want to scream at the top of my voice everytime I’m stuck in meetings that go nowhere. You know the kind. The ones that start a subject, talk about it for an hour and never get it resolved. There is literally no purpose for meetings. They need to be replaced by an email.

My wife was told by her sister that she should go to an HOA meeting, because no one ever goes to them, and she could walk right in there, sieze power of the board, and then take the reins and make some change. I was all in on that. You go, queen of the HOA! Get rid of those stupid speed bumps, and all those fees for stuff we don’t care about. Also, could you get them to finish all our basements? That would be fantastic.

When it came time for the meeting, she asked me to go. Since my scouts were cancelled, I was trapped. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Well, I could have if I was in any kind of shape, but all she had to do was block the couch and she knew she had me.

I figured I would just tag along, and it would be a super short meeting with lots of snacks and we could just sneak out after my wife made her HOA coupe.

What I didn’t count on was that there were actually people that showed up. And we were early, so we had to like make conversation with people. I was already stuck in my worst nightmare, but the worst was yet to come. I kept hoping I would wake up and it would just be a nightmare, but that never happened.

As soon as the HOA lady opened up the meeting and said, “Do we have any homeowner concerns?” it opened the floodgates of incessant, petty whining about every blade of grass that was out of place for the concerned citizens with nothing better to do. I’ve never seen pettiness on the level of these people, except in my previous 1000 blogs or so.

What I wanted to do the moment the meeting started.

Blades of grass were out of place. Sprinkler pressure was too high. The neighbors three houses down had a window with two cracks…and now there is a third. I can’t possibly look out the window without being reminded of window cracks. Then because of the  Sprinkler pressure disaster of summer 2018, people were complaining that their grass seeding hadn’t been handled for 4 years.

Oh no, so you are saying that grass that is mowed for you by people is such a hardship that you literally counted the amount of years of who cares?

Just when I thought the downhill slope couldn’t keep going it devolved into the Bitter Rivalry of the two HOA’s. There was a some road access issue between the Ponds and the Shady Groves that were fighting because of some damage in roads you can’t see and who was going to pay for it.

Couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.

I started breaking out in hives and texted my wife who was two chairs down. “Let’s Jet.” and I think even a jet could not have gotten me out of there soon enough. I severely wanted to crawl into a hole 100 feet deep to never be discovered again, but decided against it, because one of my petty neighbors would have reported it and it would have become the next headliner of HOA Summit October 2018.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH

Bitter HOA meeting Ben