Look to your left. Now look to your right. If all three of you are reading this article and just looked at each other, give yourselves high-fives.

Haha. Yeah. Also, three of you will live in a shitty apartment next year. Possibly together.

Apartment leasing is a multi-million dollar business in Ithaca, New York. Our landlords, the same ones who show up to give tours in wife beaters — if they show up at all — make magnitudes more than most of us will ever make in our lives. Weird, huh? The entire landscape of apartment renting in Ithaca is just flat out weird. From the landlords to the apartments down to the tenants.

You would think that the general incompetence of the people who rent our places to us would prevent them from actually making so much money off us. Well, apparently there is a great deal of room for error. I mean, how is it that we manage to get ripped off year after year by the same people who aren’t able to keep, say, a Tasti-D-Lite operational? Seriously, if you can’t get your books to balance, you’re doing something wrong. A frozen yogurt store, in the middle of a college town (the Collegetown, in fact)? With more sorority girls than you can shake a stick at, so to speak? That almost sounds like a better idea than a wax bar that’s open three hours a week. Now, what am I going to do when I need to apologize to my girlfriend? Buy flowers?

How can we save Tasti? Maybe our landlords should just dip into the security deposit stockpile and organize a bailout. They sure do want to support each other. In reply to an article about how Collegetown restaurants are avoiding competing with each other through pre-arranged agreements, one proprietor wrote, “These are friendly business agreements. They are lowering the risk of one business failing because of direct competition.” Yeah. God forbid.

What’s probably stopping them is that they can’t quite wrap their heads around the economics of it all. To illustrate, let me relay a conversation I had with a landlord last year, during a heated apartment search:

“Nice place,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“How much is rent?” I asked.

“Your rent will be amortized over the course of the lease.”

This guy must have been getting jiggy with AEM kids the night before.

“How much are utilities?” I asked him.

“You only pay for heat and electricity, and that’s a nominal amount,” he explained.

After talking to that housing genius, it actually boggles my mind that I am the one being ripped off. I mean, surely, as Cornell students, with high intellectual acumen, we should be the ones conning them.

Maybe if we could find them. The rental and service office in my apartment complex closed early recently. They put a sign up that stated, “Closing early today. 9/11.” As if it’s a national holiday. An American tragedy — the perfect excuse for a rental office to close early. To be perfectly honest, though, I’m not sure what I should have expected from a place that literally superglued a desk lamp to the ceiling of my room and called it a light fixture.

Then there was the guy who tried to convince me to rent an apartment behind Pixel. It was lacking both closets and windows. That’s OK, he assured me. He guaranteed that it was the “coolest” apartment on campus. That’s right, the coolest apartment on campus is the one behind the lamest bar.

From the douchebag who backs out on an oral agreement to the asshole who hangs up on you when you say, “No, all 10 of my roommates might not be able to attend the viewing,” there’s an assortment of landlords to do business with. If only the apartments in any way justified the ordeal.

All our apartments have a little special something about them. Maybe it’s a cozy, homely atmosphere. Maybe it’s a view of a lake. Maybe it’s a bathroom that has three doors of access. Maybe it’s floors that slant more than 10 degrees (and this landlord actually asked me whether that would be a “big deal” for me). Maybe your apartment’s unique feature is you. Whatever it is, you just have to find the one that suits your personality best.

This one apartment I looked at last year had ceilings so low I literally I had to crouch to be in it. After realizing that I would have to squat cross legged to take a shower, it dawned on me that such an apartment would be perfect for a tiny girl. And my suspicions were confirmed when I met her in the bedroom. When I walked into a basement apartment which had full windows, but only two inches of which were above ground, I thought how it would make a great Anime dungeon. My own apartment has rooms with doors that get stuck on the overgrown carpet. On the plus side, my roommate and I make a lot of bush jokes. On the minus side, we sometimes get stuck inside our respective rooms and need the door to be opened from the outside. Also, our oven only turns off when you put it not in the “Off” position, but in the “Broil” position. You win some, you lose some.

But you can count on figuring out a practical use for your apartment’s defects. Does your apartment have a normal sized bedroom, beautiful kitchen, enormous living room and then two more bedrooms on a different floor, both a quarter the size of any other room in the house? Take a guess which rooms you’re going to use to store your collection of vintage guitars. Is your apartment more than two miles from campus? Well, that just plain sucks.

Is your apartment that open store front on Dryden that’s never going to be occupied? Easy: DKE annex.

Forget this ridiculous myth that we need to support our local businesses. Screw our local businesses. Most of them are run by the same vultures who rent us our apartments. This way they rip us off both when we’re home and away. With a few exceptions, they are complete scum. The whole town hates us college kids. Maybe something all those fair trade clubs should think about when they quarter card us to support our local community. Our local community is a bunch of douchebags.

Harsh? Just take it out of my security.

Yevgeniy Feldman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at yfeldman@cornell­sun.com. That Really Grinds My Gears appears alternate Mondays this semester.