Notice to Looney Tunes in Regard to the Acme Anvil and Piano Company
Dear Looney Tunes. It pains us to write this, but we request that your company, the Acme Anvil and Piano Company, vacate the penthouse offices within 30 days. You’ve been a good tenant to us in many ways. You paid your rent promptly on the 15th of every month. You surprised everyone by making a success of your business. Who would have predicted that a desert town of a few thousand people would be able to support a piano and anvil company? You pioneered interspecies diversity initiatives by selling to canines, rabbits, ground cuckoos, waterfowl, etc. and treating them with the same respect you would a human.
Unfortunately, after years of bizarre accidents, sound complaints, and property damage, we’re forced to seek out a less-destructive tenant for our ninth-floor business space. We don’t understand why these accidents kept happening, but we feel negligence plays a role. The Apex Appliance Company on the north side of town is at a similar elevation, but in its 34-year history, it hasn’t had a single incident of dishwashers or microwave ovens falling from the window and flattening passers-by. Similarly, the furniture store over on Main has no complaints of plummeting La-Z-Boys.
We’ve asked around, and your problems are not “typical retail issues,” as you’ve claimed. You’ve been able to fly under the radar for years because most of the victims of your freak accidents are non-human and don’t fill out police reports. You’ve also had an astonishing number of near-misses and incidents from which victims were miraculously able to walk away. You’ve received both verbal and written warnings from us, but we’ve seen no improvement from you in any of the following areas:
· Exploding or falling pianos
We’re not experts in piano construction and we have no idea what would cause a piano to become highly combustible but, to be honest, it feels like it shouldn’t happen more than once.
· Airborne Anvils
We’re not sure what all those anvils are used for. Are people making that many horseshoes? But whatever the use, anvils should be kept grounded. We’ve had reports of your anvils falling on people and reducing them to walking accordions. Almost as bad, your anvils have been seen suspended by cables or balloons, resulting in cucumber-sized lumps on the heads of people who wouldn’t ordinarily have any reason to expect an anvil injury. There is no logical reason why anvils should be in the sky.
· Noise
We appreciate that the ruckus is limited mostly to daylight hours, but sounds exceeding 150 decibels should not come from your building quite so many times in a day. Area residents have reported the following noise violations:
crashes
shotgun blasts
bell-like clangs
explosions
high-pitched rocket noises
boinging sounds
· Mess
Who do you think cleans up the puffs of dust, soot, and debris that continually surround our property since you became a tenant?
· Road and sidewalk damage
No district in our state spends as much on road repair per capita as ours. Here are some of the kinds of damage we’ve had to fix:
gaping canyons
long, jagged cracks
perfectly round, black holes
holes in the shapes of bodies
holes in the shapes of anvils
We hope you can understand the position you’ve put us in and move out in a timely manner. We wish you the best in your continuing business ventures and hope you’ll find a location that’s a better fit for your business—preferably something on the ground floor.
We received the gift you sent to us, but if it was intended to influence our decision on the lease, we’re afraid it won’t change anything. We haven’t yet opened the ticking box, but we’ll accept it as a good-faith gesture of appreciation and apology for the years we’ve spent in a landlord/ tenant relationship.
Raised in an underground house on a pig farm, Chris Eno McMahon is an erstwhile teen bride, PTO president, and Homemaker of the Year for the state of Michigan. Look for her humor in Weekly Humorist, Slackjaw, Points in Case, and many others. Follow her on Twitter @ChrisEnoMcMahon