The Brad Hole

Around mid-February, the wyfe and I moved back to Phoenix from Austin, TX. We had been renting a house there, and our landlady was generally pretty nice to us. Anyhoo, as it happens we paid a security deposit up front, and we were naturally very curious when we moved out as to if/when we'd be getting some money back, since it amounted to almost a month's rent. So we waited about a month after our lease had ended and dropped our landlady a line. Dead silence commenced for around 6 weeks, and we decided to drop her a gentle but firm reminder. I also left a voice mail for her in case the e-mails fell into a black hole or spam filter, which would not be entirely out of the question.

That reminder did spur some action - she wrote us back to say that she had in fact mailed the check in mid-April and that if we didn't get it soon, to let her know and she'd cancel it and issue a new one. That was the beginning of May. We didn't receive said check, so we told her to stop payment on it and send out a new one. As of last week, no new check, so we fired off another e-mail, for which we haven't yet had a reply.

So we wake up this morning to find an e-mail from our landlady to what appears to be her entire address book, informing us that her e-mail and phone numbers are changing, and that she'll let us know what the new ones will be. This had the effect of setting off a big red siren. So I got on the horn, tried to call every contact number we had and a few acquaintances, and so far have come up pretty empty. I'm still hopeful that this is all a miscommunication, but the evidence is starting to mount that we'll never see our deposit refund. We could use that money pretty bad right now, so this sucks pretty hard.