| Hagar |
05-03-2006 07:39 AM |
Ok... a couple of years out of college, I worked as junior office monkey at a real estate rental office. Most rents then were paid in cash over the counter, so much of my time was just taking and receipting rents. My other main job was property inspections, to see that tenants were looking after the landlords' properties. You often see weird shit during property inspections. You never see people in the same light after seeing some folks personal lives.
Legally, we had to issue a written notice to the tenant seven days before the inspection, so they could get their shit together and clean.
Anyhow, one woman, who rented a nice modern house, always paid on time, and had been no trouble at all, took offence at the idea of an inspection. And by "took offence", I mean she went apeshit. She came barrelling into the office screaming about how "no one was coming into her house" and that she had a gun and would shoot anyone that came near the place.
We were pretty cool about it all, withdrew the initial notice, notified the owner, who naturally freaked out and insisted we get in there as soon as possible and then begin proceedings to get her out of his house.
So we issued the required inspection notice again. Nutcase tenant comes in to our office, brandishing the notice, more threats, real psycho stuff too. It became a patten over the next few weeks, psycho spotted on the street, all the office girls vanish leaving poor old monkeyboy to deal with the homicidal tenant.
I copped many an earful, colorful threat and poor character description.
The rental dept. manager, decided it was time to "out-bitch" the bitch. Sadly, this was well within her abilities. She called in a favour with the local copshop, and, a couple of weeks later, we conducted not only an inspection, but a firearms search of the premises. This involved two officers, both with drawn sidearms, and a secondaries in ankle holsters, wearing bullet proof vests with big metal plates slotted down the front. We were required to wait about 100 metres up the street until an entry was secured.
This shit fully freaked me out. This is Australia. We don't have guns (mostly). I literally don't know anyone who openly owns a gun. We used to muck around with air rifles in school, but that's about it. So to see several guns in one day (including the shotguns in the boot of the police car) was full on.
As it turned out, the property was no Waco wannabe. It was neat and undamaged, there was a convertible BMW parked in the garage, there were no guns. To this day I still don't know what the issue was.
Psycho stopped paying rent from that day. It got rather ugly (financially) for the owner after that. But we got her out in the end.
I so hope her husband's got a shed.
Wow, what an essay! If you've read all that you've done well!
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