Video Gamers Podcast - Gaming Quick Takes - Josh's Florida Story

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

From gaming hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more gaming content each week. Gaming Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Hey guys, welcome to this Quick Take episode. We're so excited to have you here with us. In the past, these Quick Take episodes actually were only available to those who financially supported the show through Apple subscriptions and Patreon. But due to popular demand, we have decided to

shake up the perks for our supporters and we'll be releasing these quick takes on Saturdays to everyone, giving you all some extra free content that was previously unavailable to the public. And these quick takes are a little more laid back and they're hosted by just one of us. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this quick take episode. Shazam! Boom! Okay, you all have been asking for this crazy story, and it's time for me to finally tell it. This is Josh. Welcome back to another Quick Takes episode. This one is not going to have anything to do with gaming, but I'm going to tell you about what I call the Florida story. And this is one of the craziest stories. This is 100% true. This actually happened to my wife and

I, and I feel like it's time to share it with everybody out there. Okay, so as some of you know, or may not know, I was a dolphin trainer. I did that for almost two years, straight out of college. I went to college for biology. I was bound and determined to work with animals. I decided that marine biology was something that I really wanted to do. I applied for a job and got this job down in Key Largo, Florida as a dolphin trainer. I was more excited than you can possibly imagine. It was a very big move. My wife was born and raised in Louisiana. She had never lived outside the state.

I had traveled around a little bit, but this was going to be the biggest move that we had ever done. We had only been married for a year or so. And here we go. It's time to be grownups and start a career and move across the country. So one of the challenges, I've got this job. I'm a dolphin trainer. This is going to be the most amazing thing ever, but we have to find a place to live. And the company that I had gotten this job with needed me down there fairly quickly. I think we only had like a couple weeks or so to get down there and get set up and move and all that stuff. So one of the things that we noticed was that it's very difficult to find a place to live in Key Largo, Florida. Now, most people have

heard of the Florida Keys. They sound very nice. Tropical. They're like almost islands. You know, this is going to be amazing. But guess what? There's not very many places to live on a low salary that a dolphin trainer would make. So we were having a very hard time finding a place. The other issue is that it was 24 hours away. And so it's not like we could just drive down there, look for places, find one, rent it, and then drive back to Louisiana because you're talking a two-day drive minimum

to drive back and forth. So we started looking online. We were doing all of our internet research trying to find a place to live in Key Largo. Now, there's only two types of places to live in Key Largo. One is a duplex house where the owner lives on the upper floor and they rent out the lower floor. There are not apartment buildings down there. There is not a lot of housing that is affordable, like a big apartment complex or something like that. So we were having a very hard time finding a place to live. It was really stressing us out. When lo and behold, in the Key Largo classifieds, I found an ad for basically a home that really sold it up. It said, hey, this is a one bedroom with a full kitchen, a screened in patio on a private corner lot with lots of trees and beautiful

everything, blah, blah, blah. And it really just sounded amazing. So I remember calling the lady up and I said, Hey, we're interested in your property. Can you send me some photos? I'd like to see what it's all about. But we're desperate for a place to live. Is it still available? She wrote back and she said, Yes, it is available. I've had a lot of people asking about it, but it's a really nice property. Everybody that's lived here has always enjoyed it. I'm sorry, I can't give you photos right now. My camera's broken and blah, blah, blah. And that should have been my first clue is that there was no photos of this place. So I'm going to start off by saying I was young and I was desperate and we had to have a place to live. So I just, you know, I went off of her word that this was a really nice place.

I told my wife, I said, Hey, everything that we've looked at that we can afford gets snatched up instantly. Should we go ahead and put a deposit down on this place so that we have a place to live? And we decided, yes, we would. I talked to the lady. I said, listen, don't worry about the photos. If you can send some to me, that's great. But we're going to be down there next week and I have to have a place to live. And so she said, yes, if you send me your deposit, I'll reserve the place for you. I'll take the listing down and it's yours for when you get here. I said, great. So we sent her the deposit money. We had our place. Life is good. It comes time to move.

We load up everything that we own in a tiny little U-Haul that we could tow behind a car. And we make the very long drive down to Key Largo, Florida. Well, when we get there, we instantly try to find the place that we're going to be staying. We had a hotel room because my wife's parents came down with us. They wanted to check out Key Largo. They wanted to see where we were living. So we did have a hotel room booked for the first night or two. But as we're down in Key Largo, we're trying to find the address for this apartment that we're going to be staying in or this house. I keep calling it an apartment, but it was like a house

is I think the way that they advertised it. And lo and behold, we cannot find the address. We keep driving by this place. It was like 4977 some road, whatever. And we can see 4975, 4979. There's no 4977. What the heck's going on? There's some old abandoned corner lot with this trailer that's broken down on the corner. And then there's nothing next to it. But then we get to this neighborhood and we're like, well, that doesn't seem right because the addresses in the streets are all different. And we can't find this place. We keep trying to call the lady and it says her phone is temporarily disconnected. And I'm thinking the timing on this just sucks. Eventually, I think I texted the lady or something like that. She writes me back and she says, hey, I'm sorry.

We've been having all kinds of problems with the phone service. You know, the place is ready for you. You can come by tomorrow to put your stuff in. Sorry about that. I said, great. I go to the place where I'm going to be working. I'm meeting everybody there. I'm talking to some of my co-workers. And one of the ladies says, oh, yeah, that address is actually right across the street from where I live.

And I said, oh, okay, well, that's fine. I could find her house on a map. So then I said, you know, where? Where is this place? And she's like, well, I think it's across the street. It should be right on the corner. I said, okay. So the next day, my wife and I, we've got everything in our U-Haul. We're going to this place. We're going to be living. And lo and behold, we cannot

find it. And we keep going and we're saying, there's nothing here. It's supposed to be here. So I call the lady, her phone service is working again. And I say, hey, where is this place at? She says, well, it's right on the corner. And I said, is it behind the trailer? Because I see that, but this trailer looks like it's been just abandoned. And she I said, is it behind the trailer? Because I see that, but this trailer looks like it's been just abandoned. And she says, no, it is the trailer. And I went, I didn't realize this was a trailer. Okay, well, man, this thing looks rough from the outside, but we have no place to live at this point. We have sold everything we own. We've moved halfway across the country. We're 24 hours from home. We don't have a place to live. Let's just go

inside this trailer and check out this place. We can live here for a month and then we can find another place, but at least we're here. So my wife is giving me the side eye because this trailer does not look like it's anything that anybody should be living in. We meet the lady out front. She says, yes, this is the the place the thing that i notice instantly is there is a tree that is growing up through the middle of this trailer i am not making this up as we're walking up to the trailer there is a gigantic tree that has literally grown through the middle of this thing and is growing out the roof my wife and i walk up. We open up the front door. The lady shows us around. This is not a trailer. This is a half of a trailer. They had put up a plywood wall in the middle of this trailer. They were living on one half of the trailer, and why would anybody agree to stay in a place like this much less pay money for it i'm telling you we did not have a choice we we had everything we own in a u-haul that needed to be back uh asap uh we had to have a place to

live because we only had a hotel room for like one more night we were as broke as two people can possibly be this was not an easy or affordable move. But once we were in Florida, I would start working at this place, start getting paychecks, and so on and so forth. So my wife and I are walking through this trailer, and we're just shaking our heads. Everything was dirty. Again, there was a plywood wall that was set up. The screened-in back patio was literally a two-by- four porch that they had slapped together and leaned against the back door of the trailer and tried to call it a porch. I could stick my arm through the floor where this porch was supposed to be connected to the trailer. It was absolutely terrible. If you can imagine a place with a tree growing through it, two by fours laid up against the back of it that weren't even

connected to it, just dirty furniture, a it that weren't even connected to it. Just dirty furniture, a kitchen that wasn't even a kitchen. It just had a gas hot plate in there. It was the worst thing you can imagine. My wife and I said, we don't have a choice. The lady said, hey, is everything cool? We said, well, this isn't really the way you described it. And she was like, she kind of instantly got defensive. And she was like, what do you mean? It wasn't worth the argument. We just said, sure. You know what? We'll take it for like a month. That's it.

The lady said, okay, here, sign this lease. We read over the lease and it was like saying, hey, we agree to three months of this and blah, blah, blah. And I was like trying to argue with the lady, but we didn't really have any choice. So we paid her for the month's rent. We gave her the security deposit. We unloaded all of our stuff. So this is not ideal, but it seems doable at this point. As we're unloading our stuff,

the lady leaves. And my wife and I are unpacking our things. And we're just noticing everything that's possibly wrong. There's ants in the bedroom. My wife is like, hey, there's lots of scorpions down in Key Largo. And this back patio is actually the living room as well. There was no living space anywhere in this trailer. And so that would be where we would have to put our TV and spend most of our time. But like I said, I could literally reach through the slats in the floor to the ground outside, which means snakes and scorpions and everything are going to be coming in at will. We might as well have just been living outdoors camping at that point. My wife breaks down. She starts crying. And she says, Josh, I can't live here. I can't. This place is not even a place. How are we supposed to live in

this thing for three months? I am trying to be strong about all this, but we are stuck at this point. We have no place to live. We had been looking for weeks. Either we could not afford it or it just wasn't available. This was the only place we could find. And I felt like we were stuck here. So we unload all of our stuff because the U-Haul has to be back. We're going to start paying huge fines for that for money we don't have. So we unload all of our boxes. Everything's in this trailer. We go back to the hotel with my wife's parents because we don't even want to spend the night in that place. We are about as low as two people can be. We're both crying. We feel trapped. We're stuck. My wife is like, I have to go home with my parents. I can't live in this place. I feel terrible that I drug my wife halfway across the country for this. And everything

is just looking absolutely terrible. And it was one of the lowest points of our life, to be honest. So the next day, I go to meet all of the rest of my co-workers and my boss and all that stuff. I start talking to my boss to tell him what's going on. And he says, wait a minute. This is completely unacceptable. You moved across the entire country to come work for us. This lady is taking advantage of you. He was like, go get your stuff out of that place. You can come live with these people for like a week that had a house down in Key Largo. They had some space. They were like,

you can live with them for like a week until we can find you another place. Just get your stuff out. We'll help you out. Go do that. And we were like, oh man, at least there's some hope on the horizon. So we go to the place to start getting all of our boxes, to load them back up, to take them to the storage area at the business where I was going to be working. The guy says, hey, tell her that you don't want to stay there. You haven't even lived in the place for like 12 hours yet. Go get your security deposit back and we'll figure it out. So we go back to the trailer. We're going to start loading up our boxes. I go to tell the lady, hey, we don't want to live here. This is not what you told us it was going to be. Honestly, you lied to us completely. I go around to her side of the trailer where the tree was growing

out of. Don't forget. I knock on the door and she's in her living room just doing drugs. And I'm talking like hardcore drugs right now. We completely caught her off guard. She scrambles to put everything away. She lets us in. We're feeling completely awkward and completely uncomfortable. She's like, hey, what's going on? What can I do for you? And I say, listen, we don't want to live here. You lied to us about the place. We'd like our money back. We're going to get all of our things out and we're going to leave. You can have it. You can rent it to somebody else. And this lady completely freaks out on us and starts yelling and screaming at my wife and I, telling us how she'd already spent all of the money that we gave her for our security deposit and the first month's

rent. And she didn't have any of that money. There was nothing wrong with the place. It was exactly as she described. And no, she's not going to give us any of our money back. Now you have to understand this is all the money that we had in the world. We were absolutely completely broke after paying for the security deposit and like the first month's rent or a couple months rent on this place. We literally had nothing. And so when this lady starts telling us that we cannot have our money back, instantly, we start saying we can't afford another place. Everywhere that you can rent requires a security deposit and first month's rent. Some of them require last month's rent, and we have zero money at all. And so we fight with this lady for a while. She finally agrees that if we pay for an ad in the paper to rent the place out, that when

somebody rents it, she will give us our money back at a prorated amount. And because this was the only agreement that we could make, we leave and we go back to my place of business. I start telling them about what's going on and they lose it. At this point, we form a plan. They say, hey, listen, go get everything except for one box out of there because this lady's crazy and we don't want her selling off all of your stuff or anything like that. But if you move everything out of the apartment, she can claim that you abandon it. And then she has a lot more rights than she currently does. So we say, okay. We go over there. We start taking all of our boxes out. The lady comes outside. She's like, what are you doing? I say, we're taking our stuff. You have completely screwed

us over. We're going to call the cops on you. We've got people that are helping us out with this situation. Give us our money back or we're going to get cops and everything else involved in this. This lady absolutely loses it. She comes storming into the trailer where we were technically supposed to be living. She closes all the windows. She closes all the doors and she locks the door and she tells us that we cannot leave. Now, at this point, this is kidnapping. This lady has gone off of the deep end and she has kidnapped my wife and I, and she will not let us out of the trailer. Now, I am not exaggerating this. There is so much craziness that is going on right now. It is unbelievable. My wife,

this lady's guarding the door, and you can just tell that she wants us to try to push her out of the way or something so that she can fall down and claim that we injured her or something like that. So my wife and I are both standing back, and we're both saying, look, this is nuts. Let us out of the house. You can't do this. She's screaming. I mean, just screaming profanities at us. And finally, she's saying, neither one of you is leaving. You're not going anywhere. You guys are staying right here. You already rented this place out. I mean, this is nuts. I'm telling you right now, this is absolutely bananas. My wife and I are looking at each other like we are in the Twilight Zone right now. Ultimately, my wife is trying to leave because we didn't have a cell phone at the time either. So this lady has us trapped in this trailer. We don't trust anything that's going to happen. We're scared that if we touch her at all to try to get out, that she's going to claim that we punched her or hurt her or something like that. Finally, my wife goes and she pushes the lady out of the way. She manages to squeeze through the door that the lady had the chain on. I don't know how she did that.

She's Houdini. She gets out of this trailer. She starts running across the street to where some of my coworkers lived. Well, the lady closes the door behind her and deadbolts it. And she's like, there, I got rid of one of you. Now it's just you and me. And I'm thinking like, I don't trust this lady at all. She's going to claim any kind of random craziness, you know?

So I just, I lose it. I go out to the one window where I can see my wife running across the street. And I tell her, I say, you know what? That's it. Call the cops. Well, all my wife hears is me yell out the window, call the cops. And so she thinks this lady has like a gun pulled on me or something like that. So she runs over, she calls the cops, the neighbors come running over, they're banging on the front door. This lady's standing inside this trailer, yelling at me and telling me that

they can keep knocking all they want. Nobody's coming in. This is her trailer, blah, blah, blah. This thing just escalates like you wouldn't believe. Eventually the cops show up. They say, hey, let us in. The lady says, no, this is my property. I'm sitting inside saying, hey, I'm in here. She won't let me out. This is what's going on. The lady finally opens the door and no lie, the second this lady opens the door, she starts crying, telling the cops how I had trapped her inside this trailer, how I was abusing her. And she starts putting on this dramatic show about how I had kidnapped her and trapped her inside this trailer. And I'm thinking, there's no way. Are you kidding me

right now? Now, thankfully, the cops knew exactly what she was doing. They're talking to her. They're talking to me. They're talking to my wife. They're talking to the neighbors. Everybody's story is lining up except for this lady's. She's freaking out. The cops are writing up this report. Lo and behold, the owner of the entire company, so not the people that I've been talking with, but the owner that owned this entire dolphin company shows up with my boss. He walks into this lady's trailer and he walks in and he goes, what the H is going on around here? And the lady looks at him and she's like, who are you? And this guy just drops his name and says, I'm Rick. I own half of this town. And if you don't give these people their money back, as of like 10 a.m. tomorrow morning,

I'm going to show up with backhoes and I'm going to tear this trailer to the ground. He's like, I'm done playing around with you. He's like, we just hired these people. They moved across the entire country to come work for us. And he's like, I'm not going to have you ripping them off right away. He was like, you have 12 hours to make this right. Or I promise you this trailer is going to be leveled to the ground. And apparently this guy could do it because he had

a ton of sway in the town. This lady freaks out. She goes stomping off. The cops are like, okay, you can leave. Don't take all your stuff out because then she can claim you abandoned it. Leave one box in here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. we are beside ourselves of over everything that had just happened this is how i met my boss this poor guy had to show up to this trailer where this lady had kidnapped us and done all this stuff it was the most insane thing i have ever been a part of the next day lo and behold the lady had the money she had it in an envelope. We didn't trust this lady at all. She's absolutely crazy. I mean, certifiably crazy. So we make her open up the envelope to show us the cash. It is only a portion of the cash that she had promised us. We call her out on it. She's like, well, just give me the keys to my place and I'll get you the rest of the money. We're like,

absolutely not. She kept trying to get us to get our box out of there. And then she'd give us the rest of the money. And I told her, I said, listen, I'm going to call my boss. I'm going to tell him that you're not following through on your end of the deal. She instantly backed down. She said, no, no, no. Give me two hours. I'll have the rest of your money for you. And lo and behold, she shows up.

She's got money in an envelope. We make her open it up again, count out the cash. It's the right amount this time. We go to hand her the key. She won't hand us the cash. It's the right amount this time. We go to hand her the key. She won't hand us the envelope. It was this weird standoff thing to where we both had to put it in the middle of a table so that the other person wouldn't snatch it and run. I don't know why she thought we wanted the key to her place.

That's the one thing that doesn't make any sense to me. But anyway, we got our money back. The lady got the key to her place back. It was the craziest experience I've ever had in my life. We could not afford a place to live. So once we finally got done with all the craziness, the reality set into my wife and I that we still didn't have a place to live. We were staying in the guest bedroom of the coworkers that we had just met. But, you know, we need to get out of there. There's nowhere to rent out. There's nowhere to buy. We're completely broke. We're trapped in

Key Largo, Florida. It was just, it was one of the lowest moments. The place that I wound up working for to shorten up what I know is already a very long story is they actually found a place that had just been remodeled and constructed that was at the very, very height of our budget. But the guy wanted first, last, and security deposits. So we wanted like $4,500 upfront, which we did not have or anything even remotely close to that. The company actually fronted us all of that money so that we had a place to live.

We did ultimately pay them back over the course of the next two years. I remember my wife and I crying because we actually had a place to stay. And it was just such an insane two weeks of our lives. It was just absolutely nuts. It wound up being an incredible experience. I loved being a dolphin trainer. Living in Key Largo was interesting. We had a lot of very good times. But man, the whole process of getting started down there was absolutely bananas. Never been kidnapped before, but this lady, uh, added that to, uh, to my bucket list apparently. So, um, yeah, so sorry for the long story, but man, this is just, you guys were all demanding that I tell you about

this crazy experience and, uh, and there it is. So there's a lot of other finer details, but I don't have time to get into that. But I hope you enjoyed my crazy Florida story. Thank you for supporting the show. I'm sorry this quick take has been more like an entire episode, but you asked for it and there you go. So I hope you enjoyed it and I am out. I will see you all on the next one. Thanks a lot, everybody.

Bye-bye. everybody bye bye