Seriously, today was a messy day at the office. Everything uber-busy this week and I think we’re currently holding a record of about 30 new leases signed in one month. All nice and fun, but then there are some days when everything happens at once in our little Real Estate company.
First thing in the morning: the waterpipes in one of our prooperties broke and flooded the entire apartment => Steffi has to fight with the gas company to get the gas turned on for an emergency dry-out while at the same time trying to get her boss off the phone with his friend to actually pay attention to stuff.
Incident number two was actually pretty interesting, though scary. We rented this place out to this girl and her little daughter and I noticed that this girl’s a) about a year younger than me and already has a kid and has been married for 6 years so that entails that b) she got married when she was like 14 which c) is so not possible even with parental consent in Utah and d) she tells me it’s been some kind of hispanic/catholic thing their family does who arranged her marriage before anyway.
So yeah, here’s me going WTF???? Must be an insane American thing. And here I am thinking I got married early last year with my 20 years of age. Man…this strange land is a strange land indeed…
So finally incident number three is about a hispanic guy who wants to get out of his lease because he lost his job and ergo can’t pay for the house anymore. Problem is that his contract ends in September so there isn’t much we can do about it besides hoping to find somebody else to take his lease over. Okay folks, picture me sitting a total of half an hour there with this guy and his translator who barely spoke any more English than he did and they just wouldn’t get it. What a nightmare. And me feeling bad about it all the way because I’m trying to help them out and make them understand what we’ll do and that we’re more than willing to help them.
So they decide why couldn’t they just move into another, cheaper one of our places instead? I’m trying to make them understand that they can’t do that because they are still in a contract at the place they’re living in now. They don’t understand. This was two days ago and they have come in like three times since.
On top of that they never paid any of their utility bills, assuming that we were paying that, even though we clearly stated in the lease and afterwards that they are responsible for water, power and gas. This is one gianormous mess. Really. Now their bills are high as heck and what are we going to do about that? Well….Darn. We’ll meet with them again and check with the owner of the property they live in to see what we’ll do. What a messy mess…
The last thing just happened right now: One of our tenants calls me telling me her neighbor had just come over and declared he’d be the new property manager and that she needs to remove her unlicenced car from the premises or he’d have it towed. I’m going: Ok, this is just ridiculous. We are still managing this property and haven’t been released from it yet. There must be a mistake. So I tell my boss and he says that he hasn’t been able to get a hold of the owner for over a week so he has no idea what is going on. The owner apparently is pretty broke, but he never released us from the management agreement, so there must be something fishy here. Plus somebody just telling their neighbors “Hey, I’m king of the hill now” is just really, really odd.
Anyway, here’s to office-life. Always interesting. Always chaotic. Always in need of caffeine.
...God kills a kitten.
Please think of the kittens...
I’m serious about the rewrite though. The plan is to rewrite One and then go and polish it some more, because this is basically an entirely new chapter. Sure, the core plot is still the same, but let’s just say starting to scribble edits into the original draft really doesn’t work, because so much just doesn’t work anymore.
