Reading Max Rashbrooke's experience of a Wellington boarding house in The Listener rekindled unpleasant memories. While he had to put up with it for almost a month, I had managed a similar dive for over a year.
The last of my hospo skills finally burned out running that joint. Thankfully, I refused to live on premises. It made me a bastard, but not a fucking bastard, as the manager in Russell Brown's time in second-tier homelessness attests.
The bed bugs arrived long after I had left the building. And there's a lot more rot to these type of places than the rising damp. I got my job at the Zombie Zoo through WINZ. There's a disturbing symbiotic relationship there worth probing, I'll vouch for that much.
