The rat is our landlord

The key to a successful relationship with a landlord is to pay on time and hope he never darkens your doorstep.
Unless the toilet is busted.
Because when things get ugly, they go south pretty fast.
Our landlord's refusal to open a locked door in our house turned into a teapot tempest yesterday with my normally sane and calm husband basically telling him to fuck off. I could hear the telephone screaming match over American Idol -- it was so loud.
All we were asking was that he open the furnace room to allow the Bell technician to splice a couple of cables so that we could get satellite television and forever be rid of Rogers Cable. But Puddy -- we call him that because he looks exactly like Puddy on Seinfeld -- would not hear of it. He and his property manager, Hellion, were in Montreal and couldn't get back to open the door.
Bastards!
We had given them four days notice to open the door today. Apparently, that was not enough notice.
Needless to say, I am up early this morning to cancel Bell and plead with them not to charge us a cancellation fee.
My dream of a Rogers-less life has been forever dashed.
What a piss off.
Days like this make me long to be a homeowner again, in spite of all the expenses and hassles. Landlords like Puddy are happy to take your money but if you ask them to do one simple thing, they go all ballistic on you. Then they serve up some lie that they invented presumably from the Landlord-Tenant Act.
Word! Tenants aren't stupid. They are merely financially challenged.
I don't get this. We pay nearly $18,000 a year to idiots like Puddy. In my mind, we pay them for a service.
But in the landlord's mind -- in Puddy's at least -- we are mere serfs who have been given the privilege of squating in his pile.
Both he and Hellion -- names changed to protect the guilty -- treat us like shit.
All because their moms loaned them some money to become landlords.
This landlord is a particular dick head. He rented us the whole house except the garage because he "needed it", then came back to us a month ago to say we could "rent" it for an extra fifty bucks. He said if we didn't want to rent it -- the attached garage -- he would rent it to someone else, presumably a grow-op entrepreneur or somebody interested in storing their flammables away from their own house.
We jumped at the offer because we've been storing our stuff in a couple of back closets.
Here's the interesting part.
The furnace room, which houses all the cables, is in the garage for which we have a key but Puddy won't let us have the furnace room key. For some reason, he trusts us not to wreck his house but is terrified we might take a hammer to the furnace. Makes no sense.
Makes me also wonder what he has in his furnace room.
I've tried to give Puddy the benefit of the doubt. His last tenants apparently ruined his hardwood and left an image of cock and balls spray painted on the wall. We can still see the flaccid member through the white paint when the light hits the wall in a particular way.
The elderly mother of a friend saw it.
But just because a landlord has one bad tenant doesn't make all of us bad.
We are nearly ideal  tenants. We don't complain. We cut the grass. We are helpful.
I fear the altercation last night will result in Puddy trying to toss us at the end of the lease. Should that be the case, I fear another visit to the Landlord Tenant Tribunal. The guy who runs it must have quite a job.
Oh well, that's life in this little burg. Could be worse.
We could be living in NYC and have rats living in the furnace room.
Oh wait, the rat is our landlord.