Mediation Fun
This morning, the next chapter in the endless bird poop story took place. Mediation at Small Claims Court. It sure was an interesting, albeit unpleasant experience. The whole ordeal took about two and a half hours.
It turns out that my assessment of the previous owner’s mind-set was pretty much accurate. No willingness to accept any form of responsibility or admit any wrongdoing (in spite of signed contracts clearly stating responsibilities that were not met).
After both parties made their opening statements, the previous owner said he would be totally open to a dialog and a discussion, but he would not be willing to pay the cleaning bill (as in “not a cent”). So what exactly do you want to talk about then? We already know that you are not thrilled about paying, ’cause otherwise you would have done it already. But we’re not going to walk away empty handed either, ’cause if we were planning on doing that, we wouldn’t have even filed the claim.
Very frustrating and annoying.
We did reach an agreement at the end, but only after we started making concessions and kept going down that path way further than we were originally planning to do. Had it not been for that, we’d actually be going to court over pigeon feces.
Our original claim was for $472. Not willing to actually take this ridiculous matter to court, we first offered to drop the court fees ($160) from our claim and settle for the pure cleaning cost ($312). His counter offer was to pay half the cleaning cost — which wouldn’t even have covered our filing and service fees at court, let alone part of the cleaning expenses. In other words, paying for the cleaning ourselves and not even bothering with court would have been cheaper. So no, that didn’t work for us.
Eventually, we settled for $235 (which is just under half of $472), but what a pain in the rear that was. He still thinks our claim is completely unreasonable. While he did apologize for not informing us about the bird nest (and have us find out by stumbling over it), he still maintains that he did nothing wrong.
To top it all of, he insisted that he would not be able to make a lump sum payment. It will be four post-dated cheques over 3x $60 and 1x $55. One for each month from May till August.
Congratulations! You have successfully managed to drag out this issue for a full year. Bloody hell!
What a ridiculous request! He makes about as much money as I do, his wife makes more. Combined, they thus have more income than we do — and he tells us he has to drag this out for another four months and that he doesn’t have two-hundred-and-a-few bucks sitting around? That’s very hard to believe.
The only good things about this agreement are:- This is hopefully the end of it — even if it’ll drag on till August — and we won’t have to deal with it for much longer. Just wait and deposit the cheques.
- He’s pretty much as upset and pissed about the settlement as we are. Or in other words: neither party got what they wanted. Sometimes there even lies satisfaction in what you don’t get.
