crack rocks pt 2

Today as soon as I show up I see 2 cars parked behind a building, both running but with no driver in either one. 4 guys and some kids are standing around them. One of the guys is crack rock illegal tenant guy.
Shit Shit Shit. It's 10:30 in the morning and I haven't even finished my coffee yet. I have to deal with THIS now?

I suck it up, walk on over to the group, say "good morning" and ask them to park the cars legally. I recognize the cars, but I know they don't belong to a tenant. I walk away, but keep my eye on them and they are still there. I call the police non-emergency number and report them as trespassers. As I'm on the phone with the dispatcher, 1 of the cars pulls away. Nevermind, I tell the lady, I think they're leaving. Well, she says, if they come back, give us a call.

Now as I sit in the office, tenants in the building across from me are grilling out, and there's big guy in a white polo shirt standing at the corner of the building. I know he's not a tenant, but if he's a guest of 1 of the others there's not much I can do about it now.

I see him walk across to another building, so I grab my keys and emergency phone and follow him. He's on the back stoop of 1 of the tenants in a building behind the office. I say hi to him, talk to some of the kids who are out playing, and notice a car that has been driving through the parking lot all morning parked illegally. I ask him if it's his car and he nods no. I say that I don't want to stick a parking violation on it until I ask the person to move it, and he sort of nods. I walk up to the group BBQ-ing and ask them if they know who's car it is and they say it's a friend of another tenant. Sure enough, 2 seconds later she's getting in the car and leaving. The big guy must be her look-out.

I try to be calm in these situations, but I'm always shaking afterwards. Do I want to be a warrior on the front lines in the war against drugs? No. Because there will always be more of them than of me. But I do want to do my job well, and this is my job.

How the fuck did I get here? I am midwestern through and through. I am blonde naturally. Confrontation is my biggest fear. I am addicted to beer and cheese, and can give up beer but not cheese. I seriously go through cheese withdrawl. I will probably die in jeans and a t-shirt, because it's my favorite outfit. I own a bunad. I own a gun and can drive a tractor, my car is a stick shift and I would rather drive in 6 feet of snow and ice than in heavy city traffic.

Ugg, I'm fighting off panic attack number 2 of the week. Time to suck it up and make "rounds" - it's like being a college RA or a camp counselor. I walk around and scold people for doing things that are against the rules and we both know full well they'll start again as soon as I leave. Damnit I hated the college RAs. The worst part of "rounds" are the basements. They're small and dank and dark and you never know who, or what, you're going to find. Last week I found graffiti on the wall that said "Yung Assasinz" in cray paz. CRAY PAZ. The oily crayon things kids use. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. The maintenance lady found a sleeping bag from someone who was living in the basement stairwell (homeless person or illegal tenant, who knows?) THIS IS WHY YOU CAN'T PROP THE DOORS OPEN. Also, people hide their drugs in the basement.

Okay, I feel better having vented. But on a side note, if I ever find / have to deal with a dead body, I quit.

crack rocks

I finally leave on Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, but with the knowledge that I have to come back and spend all day Saturday here. At least I am going to go to a carnival and then see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 with some of my teammates.

I swing by the movie theater on my way home to check out movie times and buy us tickets, and while I'm in the lobby calling girls to see which time works best and how many tickets we need, my emergency cell phone rings. The "emergency phone" is a Nextel cell phone I have to carry around 24 / 7. I hate it, and mostly it gets used for walkie-talkie-ing the accounting office / the woman who is my "property management consultant".

I've never had a REAL emergency call yet, and standard procedure is to not answer, let the caller leave a message, and then check the messages. This is to avoid me yelling something inappropriate at a tenant when they call and wake me up at 3 am to tell me they need a note from me so the cable company can drill a hole in their wall.*

*Actual emergency phone call.

I'm standing in the lobby of the movie theater, 2 cell phones in hand, feeling like an asshoIe. 1 is in use to a teammate and the other is ringing. I check the emergency phone caller ID, and it says "Private". I ignore it and go back to movie planning. It rings again a few minutes later, and again caller ID says "Private". Since I had just emailed the police an hour earlier, and it says "Private" when they call my office, I decide to take a chance.

Sure enough, it's the neighborhood police officer getting back to me about the traffic in the building I had asked about. He seems very excited. "Oh man, I wish you would have been in your office just 20 minutes later, you could have seen the whole thing go down!" It seems he and his partner apprehended a guy selling drugs with 6 crack rocks on him, and the address he gave the police was the same one I was wondering about. And sure enough, he's not on the lease. "Slam dunk", as my "property management consultant" (hense forth known as my fairy godmother) said. I walk out of the movie theater lobby, grabbing a flier about children and R-rated movies on the way so I can take notes. I write the down the details, names, etc., and wonder if anyone walking by has a clue that I am scribbling down "Joe Doe, 6 crack rocks". They probably think I'm writing down movie times or phone numbers. I also wonder if this is a conversation we should be having on a cell phone. But the police officer is really excited and I don't want to interrupt him. Again he says he wishes I would have been there to see it, and I don't have the nerve to tell him I don't want the local dealers to think I have anything to do with busting them / getting them evicted. I don't want them around, but I don't want them to know that, or that I know anything at all. I hope that I'm snowing them more than they're snowing me. It's a 2-way street.

So now I can get rid of the tenants, but I have to wait until the police report comes out with the address on it, and not let anything slip to the legit tenant 'til then. Act casual, just act casual....

The carnival was great, I had part of a deep-fried snickers bar and went on 2 of those rides that go up in an hour and are held together by rusty screws. The movie was not so good.

PS - I just went outside to remind one tenant we need to do his paperwork so he can sign a new lease for another year and the "crack rock" tenant asked me if they need to sign a new lease. Oh shit, make something up about why she doesn't need to do it yet, bullshit, bullshit....

Screw the past, let's focus on NOW

I was going to refrain from sending my friends and family a link to the blog until I had put together a concise history of the job up to this point - from about mid-March 2007 to today.

Then, today, in the middle of 7 people in my 12' x 17' office all yelling about the old property manager cheating them out of money, I decided, "Fuck It." This job is too crazy and I don't really want to relive the past. I want to move forward to the disasters of today and tomorrow.

I can sum up the job transition in 2 main points:

1. Crazy mis-handling of HR. I was supposed to begin this job on March 1, but was delayed 2 weeks by the old property manager taking a week to move her copious amounts of crap out of the office, and then the woman who was supposed to train me how to do this job went to Florida for a week and they wanted me to hold office hours anyway, which I refused to do until I had been trained.

Because they gave the old property manager no deadline as to when she had to have all her stuff off the premises, I would show up to the office and random things would be missing, like toner and stamps and the plastic base the computer monitor used to sit on. We changed the locks so she couldn't get into the office, but the maintenance lady would let her in. Also, there is STILL a vacant apartment full of her stuff.

• SUB-POINT: I didn't know about the vacant apartment full of her stuff until I was showing a prospective tenant vacant apartments and opened the door to find: A) the place reeks of rotten meat because she had stored meat in the freezer, then unplugged the fridge/freezer causing the meat to begin defrosting, removed the meat but left blood in the freezer which rotted because it isn't plugged in. And, B) One of the bedrooms stacked floor to ceiling with her junk.

2. Money Madness

As soon as the old property manager left and I arrived, tenants stopped paying their rent. This was a "how much can we get away with?" maneuver, sort of like a 5-year-old does with a new babysitter. Soon enough, as I began issuing eviction notices, people stopped pushing the limits of non-payment. However, one particularly wily tenant who was about $1700 in debt and about to get evicted came up with a plan: she decided to accuse the old property manager of stealing her rent payments.

Now she's buzzing around telling all the other tenants the company is stealing her money and all hell has broken loose. Everyday I show up to the office there's a new resident at my door claiming they made payments that aren't on their account ledger. Everyday I tell them to bring in all the receipts they have so I can make copies and pass the info along to the company who does our bookkeeping. Of course in this community, no one has a bank account or check book, so everyone pays their rent via money order, and no one has any money management skills or receipts. Or the money came from some church. Or they made the payment in cash, etc, etc.
Hmm, the old property manager leaves, you owe 3 months' rent, but claim you made $900 worth of payments to her that don't show up on your account and you don't have receipts because you paid in cash...
I have long ago stopped trying to decipher the levels of true or false.

Then, after the 7 shouting people leave my office and the Latino family I've been trying to get approved for an apartment for a month can piece together enough of my gringo Spanish to understand I can let them move in by June 1, I look around for the hidden camera that I'm sure must be mounted on top of the computer, or on the ceiling, or in the phone, SOMEWHERE, documenting me like the Truman Show... I just know it's here... reality TV bastards...

Part 2: Why I do this job

• 1. I get paid. I get paid better than any other job I have found in this city.
• 2. I don’t do this job because I care about people. I don’t, you know, want to harm people, but I don’t really care, either. I manage to work up a good amount of hostility towards, and action against, general injustice (war, no gay marriage, no universal health care, etc. etc.), but when it comes to individuals and their problems (“I can’t pay my rent because my car was towed and I had to get it out of impound so I could go to work”), I really, really don’t care.
• Ok, I DO care on a basic human level, but I don’t get involved because if I care, this job becomes so depressing and overwhelming I can’t do it. Also, you can't fix people or their problems. Be a nice person, donate to charity, be a polite driver, and you will make a bigger difference in the world than if you make zero-interest forgivable loans available to everyone in the country who makes less than 20,000 a year.

Part 1: How I got this job

I was working full-time for an organization, but as a temp. For a year. A looooong year of no sick time, no vacation time, no benefits. I needed better pay and an official full-time job or I was going to leave, they needed someone to manage a rental property in the worst part of the city. For 20 hours a week. So now I do my old job 20 hours and the property management 20 hours, which in real math = 1 full time job, but in HR math = 2 full-time jobs being done by 1 person. Everyone wins! Right?