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....