Indignant rant alert

I moved out of my apartment back in mid-December, probably a bit earlier than most of the folks who are staging in March, because I wanted to be free to help my mom with her own move to TN (then expected to happen in late Jan.) and spend my last few weeks with her before Morocco.  Here's something I didn't count on:  that I would still be paying for that stupid apartment until the end of May as it sits there empty!  What a tremendous waste.  Here's why:

My lease isn't up until the end of May 2010.  The contract is written in such a way that says the tenant assumes the responsibility of covering the rent until the end of the lease period, regardless of whether or not he/she is living there, or until the management company finds a new tenant to sign a new lease.  (Big corporate out-of-state management co.--first indicator that this isn't going to end well.)  I gave the building managers two whole months notice that I was going to be moving out, and for a month of that time I was gone to India, so they could show the apartment at any time with no problem.  This is in a student neighborhood near a major university in an upscale renovated building.  It never even occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to find somebody else before that two months was up.  So when I did finally move out and that was the case, I had to pay the next month's rent and cross my fingers that they'd rent the place real quick and I get most of it refunded.  Guess what?  Didn't happen.

After two months of increasingly frantic calls to the manager explaining that I was leaving for Africa soon and that I didn't have the money, means, or inclination to keep paying for this boondoggle, and that some kind of alternate arrangement had to be made, the on-site manager suggested I write to the corporate office explaining the situation and that maybe they would let me out of the lease.  So I did my specialty: a long, well-reasoned yet impassioned letter describing that I was leaving for the Peace Corps, which is unpaid national service, and that I had no control over the timing of when I had to move, that I had been a model tenant who hadn't complained about their terrible building security, that I would forfeit my security deposit, and thanking them profusely for their consideration.  A week later I get a call saying, essentially, "Well, they thought you might have qualified under the Military Exception, but it turns out not. Sorry, bye!"   My head just about exploded.

Basically, what they're saying is this:  If I were going over to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill some people, they be cool with that.  They'd cut me all the slack the law forces them to.  But since I'm only going overseas to help people and hopefully improve the quality of their lives, tough luck.  Never mind the inverted moral calculus of this that is enough to make my blood boil, but it doesn't even make sense from a practical standpoint.  Last I checked, we still had an all-volunteer army who made just as much of a voluntary decision to join up as I did to join PC, so how do I not deserve the same leeway?

And when I think about how much money that I'm wasting on this I want to cry.  Just pouring it down the drain to do nothing for no one.  If I don't find some other way to wrangle free, I will have paid over $4500 rent on an empty apartment by the end of May.  The average per capita income for citizens of Morocco is $3950/year.  Think of the impact that money could have had in someone's life.  Think of that lovely apartment sitting empty for almost half a year that could have housed someone who has no roof over their head.  All because some greedy corporation has my signature on a piece of paper and cares more about what they can get away with than how their actions affect anyone else.

So I'm left with two options:  I can do what I feel like doing and just not pay anymore, and probably come home in 2.5 years to a pile of collection notices and seriously damaged credit.  Or I can give up, submit, and hate myself in the morning.  Of course you already know which it will be.  Like somebody said on The Wire, "the game stay the game."