The last time I rented an apartment was in the 1992. A lot has changed since then. For starters, back in the good old days, I signed a few pages of a contract, I would say about 3 pages at most, and was handed a key. As long as nothing broke down in the apartment, I never had a reason to talk with the building management and since I paid on the first of the month, there was no reason for them to talk to me. No contact whatsoever. In my eyes, the perfect landlord/ tenant relationship.

Some 30 years later much has changed. I should have gotten the hint when we signed the rental agreement. The sales person pestered us to sign the contract almost immediately after we agreed to rent the unit. All set up automatically through the portal. The portal would send us messages every day reminding us to sign our agreement. We would have gladly driven after to their office and done so, but signing a contract in this day and age isn’t such a simple matter.

The portal is the most important tool of a smart apartment. All communication must first come through the portal. Talking to anyone who works in the building is insufficient. Anyone who has ever put an app on their computer know this could be easy one two process or a descent into Hell. This was more of a descent into Hell — a half hour struggle to create a user ID, complete our personal details and finding the link to the contract. Whew.

Not terribly onerous but a little annoying and, honestly, driving up and signing the contract would have been faster because signing through the portal took a good hour. The biggest problem was that the document was 120 pages long and each page had to initialed. EVERY SINGLE PAGE (capital letters so you know I mean business here)

Bob was cooking dinner when he started the process. He thought he could complete the task while waiting for the water to boil and the pasta to be cooked. Boy was he wrong. He would glance at page, initial, send to computer and then wait for the system to complete the process. Some pages went through like a rocket into space, other pages resembled a glacier moving an inch over the course of a thousand years.

A lot of the 120 pages were in Spanish. These pages were duplicates of the English language pages. Now I realize property management were covering their asses, and this is necessary in these litigious time but I would think it could have been handle with a quick question at the beginning — do you want to see the contract in Spanish or in English — this is particularly helpful in eliminating needless time staring at a frozen computer screen. I get waiting endlessly for a screen to change for the English pages but why do I have to stare at a computer screen endlessly waiting for the Spanish language pages to change. I would call that user unfriendly.

Back to Bob and the pasta boiling. The pasta was ready and Bob wasn’t even close to finishing initialing the contract. He had to stop and concentrate on the meal but then he had this concern that will the app save all the pages he already initialed so he could come back later and complete the task or would he lose everything — always a concern when using apps. He opted not to risk losing all his work and convinced me to finish initialing the contract while he completed making the meal.

At this point, he had initialed 60 pages so neither of us could imagine there being many more pages to initial. Boy were we wrong. There were 60 more pages. I realize I was supposed to be reading the pages and understanding the contact before initialing. But 60 pages of paging through a legal document and looking at a twirling hourglass is boring enough, reading it was way too much to ask. Particularly when I realized I would have to complete the same task later for myself.

I decided to just rub my lucky rabbit’s foot, did a quick sign of the cross, filled my glass of wine and initialed away. I am hoping I haven’t agreed to indentured servitude. So far so good.