Hi Friendos,
I was watching Kelly Reichert’s latest film, Showing Up, and some scenes with a pigeon brought back visceral memories of an incident in my old coop apartment building. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on my door, wondering if I could help her install some pigeon spikes on her windowsills.
Installing pigeon spikes requires blobbing some glue on the back and sticking them into place. Sure, I was happy to help.
We went up to her unit and it was chaos. Her kids’ bedroom was completely torn apart, garbage bags and plastic sheeting all around, dad was corralling the two kids in the back, and there was a cleaning person they hired who was on break with one arm dangling out a window holding a cigarette. “Is she smoking in my kids’ room?” I could not help with that. “Um, where are you putting these spikes?”
I got to work clearing the area in front of the kitchen window sill while my neighbor went to talk to the cleaning person. I was basically done by the time she came back. “We hired someone to clean that room because pigeons built a nest on top of the window AC unit.” Eventually, bird mites that lived on the pigeons found their way inside the window and all over the kids’ bedroom.
The photos were pretty gross – there were so many mites. The window unit was no longer functional due to pigeon poop. The carpet in the room would not survive the required cleaning, so it had to be landfilled, along with some bedding and other items. Plus the cost of the exterminator, then the cleaning person after that because they didn’t feel like they knew how to properly clean around the toxic materials used by the exterminator. All in, it might have been enough money to fully fund an IRA that year.
If only they had installed spikes when the pigeons first started hanging around.
I’m a big fan of maintenance of things. Sometimes it is not enough to do the chore – you really have to do it promptly. Never snooze on water damage! Get that insurance in place! Don’t let the small tedious thing turn into a giant horrible thing. I suggest you should be a little boring this week and tackle something you’ve been putting off.
-Stephanie
p.s. our summer school class (“Anatomy of a 1040”) starts next week. If there are things about taxes you’d like to better understand, drop me a line and I’ll try to incorporate it into a future newsletter.
Frequently Taxed Questions 