they told me complaints had to be submitted in writing. they did not specify how much writing.
quick context. I rent a parking spot through my apartment building, separate monthly fee, been doing it for eighteen months. about four months ago they resurfaced the lot and in the process painted the spot lines slightly differently and my spot ended up about eight inches narrower than it was before on the driver side, which means I have to either park crooked or get out on the passenger side and climb over. I'm 6'2 and this is not a small inconvenience.
I went to the building office to mention it. the woman at the desk, very nice, clearly did not want to deal with this, told me that maintenance issues had to be submitted in writing through the tenant portal and that verbal complaints couldn't be logged. fine. I went home and logged into the tenant portal.
the complaint field had no character limit.
I want to be clear that I did not plan what happened next, it kind of evolved organically. I started describing the issue. then I found myself naturally providing context, the history of the spot, the resurfacing timeline, a brief overview of standard parking spot width regulations in our state which I had looked up out of curiosity, a description of the specific physical challenges the current configuration presents for a person of my height and build, a comparison of my ingress and egress times before and after the resurfacing based on my rough estimates, and a short conclusion paragraph summarizing my requested resolution which was simply to repaint the line.
the complaint was 1,847 words. I have written shorter college essays.
I submitted it at 11pm on a Wednesday. by Friday morning the building manager had called me personally, which had never happened before in eighteen months, to let me know they would be repainting the spot the following week.
the line has been repainted. I get out on the drivers side now like a normal person. I like to think somewhere in a filing system there is a 1,847 word document about a parking spot that someone had to read in its entirety.