After repeated electrical overloads prevented her from properly cooling her bedroom, a 24-year-old tenant disconnected her neighbor’s unsafe extension cord and locked access to her assigned outlet. But the move left he wondering whether or not she had done the right thing since it left her 60-year-old neighbor effectively without power.
Heat waves make people do some pretty crazy things. And are well known for bringing simmering neighborly tensions to a boiling point.
A 24-year-old tenant discovered that her neighbor, a woman over 60, had been using an extension cord. The neighbor was running two air conditioners and an industrial fan, along with her indoor and outdoor lighting. The additional power demand on her own circuit left the tenant with too little power to cool more than a small section of her bedroom during this latest round of hot weather. She wanted to help the 60-year-old woman out and asked the neighbor several times to reduce her electricity use and only keep necessary devices to keep the circuit from overloading.
When I first read her account of events, I thought there was something wrong with the neighbor’s utility connection, but after rereading the original post, it appears that the issue with the neighbor’s own utility connection only came AFTER the tenant had locked her out of her own utility box. So this really just leads me to believe that the whole thing was really just about stealing her power in the first place and tricking the tenant into playing for her power, or just hoping that she would be too much of a pushover to say or do anything about, as she had until this point.
Dealing with extreme temperatures within your home and not being able to do anything to escape it becomes a concern. But I don’t think that the hot weather was the neighbor’s primary concern. While it’s important to be neighborly and help people when you can, this has well-past escalated to the point where it’s the landlord’s responsibility to do something about this.
I think it’s pretty safe to say the tenant, the woman who shared this story with an online community, isn’t in the wrong. But by no means does that make anything about this situation acceptable.
Author: Kayitsi.com
