Chaos Theory

Well, I at least think I'm referring to chaos theory here, please correct me if I'm wrong. What I'm trying to refer to is that once something goes wrong, everything goes wrong.
You might remember me writing something about our lovely (<- being very sarcastic there) flatmate Natasha leaving our flat and an English girl moving in. Well, that didn't happen. English girl didn't really like the mouldy bits of our apartment so she said no. Totally normal and not quite unexpected coming from her. For Natasha however, this was very unexpected, especially since she was already planning on moving out, and it had taken her over a week to find someone willing to take her room.

So she set out to find someone else, and a week later Maya, another American girl, came over to meet me and my other two flatmates. Maya seemed a lot more okay than the English girl and she wanted to move in. Everything was working out. Until... Money. Yes, that's always a difficult part. Now you might think that I'm referring to Maya here, but I'm not. I'm referring to Natasha. What I didn't mention last time was that Natasha is moving out because she cannot afford the rent. She's known this since she's moved in, back in November, but she was sorta counting on a grant from the American government. But frankly, they don't give out grants to people who've got over $2000 worth of outstanding parking/speeding tickets and who've waited so long with paying them that they have to appear before the Supreme Court and risk getting arrested when getting on a plane. When she told us this, we thought she was being very naive, she thinks it's just The American Way. Well now, she refrained from telling us this until she completely ran out of money two days after we had to pay the rent. Nice, very nice. But she sorted it out with the agency we're renting the flat from: she could pay next month when she would get her student loans.

So, that seemed okay. Everything was sorted out and Maya was going to move in, so Natasha would get her deposit back and could pay the deposit for her new, cheaper room. That would have been okay, if it had happened. Because we have an ongoing mould problem, I called the agency to ask them when they were finally coming by, and I got a surprising answer: as long as we don't pay the full rent, they we're not coming over to fix it. They didn't know anything about Natasha's situation, or her 'sorting the rent out with them'. Nice. And it get's even nicer: Natasha's also responsible for the gas bill, so we thought we'd check that out as well. Just guess what we found.

No really, just take you're time and guess (though I don't think it's that hard).

Of course the gas bill (£140, about twice the amount we were expecting, but then again, Natasha was the one who thought 60 degrees (I'm being absolutely serious here) was a normal temperature for an apartment, especially at night and when nobody's home) was not paid. It wasn't in anyone's name either. Natasha also did not sign the lease, so she's now in no way connected to our flat apart from the fact that she's living here without paying. She now owes us £555, and counting (£18 a day, we've calculated), and has shown no intention of paying this. And because of this rather tricky financial situation, Maya decided not to move in. Even better.

So of course, Natasha broke down. She's been trying to find someone to take her apartment for three weeks and hasn't been able to find anyone. She's also very angry at all of us, because we have decided that when someone does move in, we're getting the £540 deposit, and not her. As she was so busy with panicking and being angry, we kind of decided to take matters into our own hands and find a new flatmate.

So, I posted an add on Gumtree and got 15 reactions within 2 hours of whom 10 people already came over, and 1 guy has just called to say he will take the flat. And though he seemed really nice, we've got two other people (a girl and another guy) who we liked better and we're still waiting to hear back from them. So, within half a day we've been able to find someone who wants to move in right away and who we actually all like.

Lessons learned: 1) don't trust someone you don't trust to take care of important matters (seems kinda obvious put that way, but apparently it wasn't). 2) I start to many sentences with the word 'so'. Very annoying.