It's official

I am not only insane, but also cold and heartless.

You see, my victory was sweet but ephemeral. The management replaced the stolen doorstop. Undeterred from my goal of keeping the ambient temperature under one hundred degrees, I decided to place a sign on the door. It contained no obscenities, which I considered a very significant moral victory. It simply read:

The double doors are designed to keep the building cool. Please keep the doors closed. Thanks!

That's it. Nothing too fancy, and no F-bombs. And the sign worked, as long as it was left there, which was about fifteen hours. The next morning the sign had been removed and I could tell as soon as I walked out my door into the sweltering hallway. I replaced the sign. The next day it had been removed. I was content to continue battling the rotund forces at work against me, but today, the manager of our apartment complex called to inform me that the rotundarino had informed her of our recent feuding.

She told me the rotundarino's reasons for wanting the door open.

Evidently it is important to keep the building ventilated, lest it come down with a mustiness. I countered with the solid fact that Utah, being a desert, does not exactly encourage bacterial growth, or any of the consequent odors.

Evidently it is also important to keep the door open to let the small atrium area dry out after being mopped. I was frank in my contempt for this argument. It is well over a hundred degrees outside. Sorry, but no amount of door-propping could expedite the drying of that floor, which is an already instantaneous process. Not having it.

The final reason cited was that one of the first floor tenants is wheelchair bound, and propping the door open makes entry and exit easier.

I didn't expect it, but I was stumped. I know the disabled woman, she is quite a pleasant person, and I know she gets around as well as any of the able among us. She lives alone, she transports herself all over Salt Lake, she knows how to get it done. I feel I can rest assured that she is as capable of opening both the first and second set of doors she encounters when entering or exiting our building. Frankly, I don't see how propping one of the two sets of doors open helps her out much at all. (Perhaps management should invest in an automatic door opening device if they are concerned with her inconvenience?)

But I had no retort. A person can't very well say "I don't care to ease the burdens of the disabled tenant; I prefer to keep our energy use down and hopefully have a planet to pass on to my posterity instead." Nope. You say that, you're sounding like a big-time jerk. So, instead, I told my manager that if the reason for propping the door was truly to make easier the life of our paraplegic pal, I would cease and desist with the sign-making.

But I'm still going to unprop it every time I see it open. And that rotundarino better watch her back.