Condemnation Part Two

The day of our attack and Jim’s stabbing was pretty uneventful. It had been a quiet, lazy day as most middle of the month days can be in apartments. Nobody moving out, nobody moving in. The weather was nice so there was little physical work to do outside. Most of Jim’s current work orders had been completed and any administrative tasks had been dealt with by me earlier in the day. Just before five that afternoon, I stopped into say goodnight to the girls that worked in our Regional Office. While I was in there chatting, the Office Manager asked me to check on one of the units on the sixth floor as they had just received a noise complaint from one of their neighbours. I left the office immediately and jumped on the elevator which took me up to the sixth floor in no time. Even before I got off the elevator, I could clearly hear audible sound coming from down the hall. There seemed to be what appeared like loud crashing noises being made as heavy furniture or items came crashed to the ground after having being thrown into the air.

I knocked fairly loudly on the unit’s door while announcing myself clearly at the same time. After a brief hesitation, the door opened to reveal a young, black male in his early twenties. When I asked to speak to the tenant, he advised me that she wasn’t home at the moment. I asked him if he knew why I might be here, and he answered that he did. He also told me that they were all getting ready to leave as they had just called to request a taxi to collect them. I thanked him for his time, and reminded him that it was the actions of himself and his friends that would reflect positively or negatively on the tenant as she was responsible for any of her guest’s behaviour, whether she was there herself or not. He apologized to me, promising that this would be the end of it. While I was talking to him, I took the time to survey as best I could the state of the unit. I noticed that a book shelf had been overturned, as well as the sofa and coffee table. This would explain the loud thumps I had previously heard to be sure. While I was only able to see two others while I was standing at their front door, I could not help but notice that both were most definitely under the influence of something. Regardless, there wasn’t much more that I could do so I thanked the young man that had answered the door and returned to my own apartment which was located on the main floor at the time of the attack.

By the time I got back to our apartment, it was close to twenty past five which meant for all intents and purposes we were finished work for the day. Jim and I were getting our jackets on when our phone rang. It was John from the sixth floor and all he said as way of introduction was “They’re at it again.” I asked him if he would call the police as they could only receive a complaint of this nature i.e. a noise complaint from another tenant and not the property’s owner or representative. He responded that he “couldn’t be bothered” but he still expected Jim or myself to do something about the situation, and to do this immediately! If it had been any other tenant, I most likely would have ignored the complaint but because it was from this particular tenant, I knew that if neither one of us responded that he would most definitely submit a complaint to our Regional Office regarding us. I also knew that he would be peeking through his own door waiting for one of us to return to the unit in question. With all of this in mind, I grabbed Jim to come upstairs with me figuring that as soon as we’d dealt with the complaint, we could be on our merry way to do some shopping at the mall!

If only we had managed to get that far. We both could hear a bit of noise as we stepped off of the elevator but nothing like I had heard earlier. This time Jim placed himself directly in front of the tenant’s door while I stood slightly off to his left. He knocked a few times with authority, but didn’t have a chance to announce who it was. We both heard the deadbolt and lock just prior to the door opening up. Literally the second that the door opened and without any sort of warning, a fairly large fellow jumped across the door’s threshold and pushed Jim extremely hard across the hall and against the door to the opposite unit. Our building has proper fire doors which are by nature extremely sturdy. When the back of his head hit that door, I could literally hear his skull cracking. It not only seemed like such a loud sound but the only sound. Jim was immediately knocked out and didn’t end up regaining consciuousness until the beating was near its end. In short order, two other pretty big fellows came running out of the apartment.

At one point, one of the three assailants took a moment to push me off to the side, otherwise all three of them were intent on savagely attacking Jim. It was utterly incomprehensible in so many ways. They all seemed to be following the lead of the first fellow to attack, and were mimicing everything that he was doing.  If he was pummeling Jim with his fists then so were the others. If he was jumping in the air and kicking Jim with his heavy boots, then so were the other two. It was deeply upsetting as I felt complete helpless and useless. I didn’t know what to do after my intial attempt at jumping on one of the attacker’s backsides, in the vain hope of distracting him, had been quickly and effortlessly stopped! From a great distance, I could hear my own voice screaming at them to stop, that they were killing my husband and that I didn’t understand why they were even doing this to us. My brain couldn’t seem to remember how to dial for emergency services although my fingers somehow managed to dial 911 all on their own. It wasn’t until I managed to barely hear a distant voice offering assistance that I even realized what I had done. The kept repeating that I needed to tell them where I was in order for them to send any assistance. Eventually I managed to get my cell phone to my mouth, and was coherent enough to obviously offer our address to them.

Probably the entire attack lasted all of two minutes, perhaps a bit longer though I honestly can’t say. Near the end of the attack a fourth fellow came out of the unit and actually attempted to help me and Jim. He tried to pull the others off of my husband in an attempt to get them to stop. When the attack first started, I was absolutely convinced that they were not going to stop until Jim was dead. That’s what it looked like to me. I had never witnessed anything so utterly savage and out of control as these three lads appeared to be to me. Then as suddenly as it all started, it seemed to end. I don’t know at what point the four of them made the decision to stop or even why they made this decision. All of a sudden they seemed to have taken flight, and just as quickly, were gone from my sight. I couldn’t even begin to tell you which direction they took or how they even managed to get off of the sixth floor. The moment that they were gone, the only thing that I could see was Jim, and the state that they had left him in. I couldn’t get over how much blood there was. It seemed to be everywhere. It was soaking through the carpet rapidly and there was so much of it, you could actually see where everyone had stood as footprints had been left behind. There seemed to be an equal amount of blood all over the door and wall behind Jim as well as all over both of us. We were covered.

At that point neither one of us was aware that a weapon had been used. I never say the knife and Jim said that he never felt it. It wasn’t until the first police officer had arrived on the scene that a weapon was even mentioned. He noticed something peculiar about Jim’s jacket and t-shirt – if you can believe it, Jim was actually wearing a red jacket and similarly colored t-shirt at the time of his attack !!! By this time Jim had regained consciousness but was having an extremely difficult time talking and breathing. We would later learn that this was a result of one of his lungs being punctured and subsequently collapsing at the scene of the attack. After closer examination, it looked like he had approx seven decent stab wounds on his left upper arm, five on his upper back, four throughout his head, six on various parts of his chest and one dangerous looking wound near his throat on his right side. They had managed to literally split his forhead in half. There was a constant stream of blood flowing from this wound. All in all, he did not look in very good shape.

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

 

Condemnation

It’s been almost three years since Jim and I were attacked, and Jim stabbed multiple times, while at work. Even after this amount of time passing, I still find it rather difficult to talk at length about this event. Just thinking about what happened that day still feels so surreal to me, almost as if I am watching it happen to somebody else and not myself. I have pretty much avoided even mentioning that day if at all possible in any of my entries. The few times that I did bother to reference the attack, I pretty much made sure this is done in passing and as casually as possible. Immediately following the attack, I was still so much in shock that it was relatively easy avoiding this topic. Even today, I find it difficult to wrap my head around what ended up happening to us that Monday afternoon, and how, almost three years later, we are still suffering from the events of May 12, 2008. Now, though, I feel I am ready to share all of the details and specifics of this attack and stabbing that has been so absolutely life altering to me and my family – kind of mind boggling what can end up happening in what was probably no more than two minutes in length!

At the time of the attack, Jim and I were Building Managers for one of the larger high rises in the city. The building we were responsible for looking after had always been a pretty quiet and peaceful one. In the half year that we had been there, there had been no unusual or significant events that stood out as particularly unusual. Pretty much a gravy job all in all. Jim and I shared a single position so to speak, and we divided our duties accordingly. For the most part, I did all of the administrative work related to this position such as rent collection, maintaining building’s rental ledger and ensuring all vacant units were in “rentable condition” et al while Jim looked after all of the physical aspects i.e. cleaning and maintaining all common areas of the building, garbage and snow removal and any unit repairs as required.

Obviously, being a Building Manager of a reasonably large apartment building – 96 units over eight stories – you can absolutely be assured that there will certainly be some very special moments, not to mention a stereotypically odd assortment of characters residing within these eight floors. Some days were definitely easier than others, as were some tenants, but all in all, we knew we had it pretty easy. The majority of the tenants were easy to get along with and undemanding at best. Everyone seemed to respect each other’s space so intervening in tenant disputes of any kind were practically non-existent. For the most part, I rarely found any of our tenants irritating or annoying, but like everything else in life, there will always be an exception to the rule!

The exception of our building just happened to be one of our sixth floor tenants who had lived in the building with his wife and two young sons about five years at the time of our attack. Where all of the other tenants were a joy to interact with, he was the complete opposite and then some. You could count on hearing from him on a daily basis, even on weekends and after hours which were normally supposed to be free of any work related issues, not to mention your time off and away from work! John, as he will be referred to from now on, would literally be waiting on the main floor for one of us to unlock our office bright and early every morning without fail. There was always some important nugget of information that he felt compelled to share with us without delay. It took every bit of self control not to over react and lose it on him. I don’t think I’ve counted to ten as often as I had during those six months. Jim and I eventually learned how to effectively deal with him so that we were able to minimize any interaction with him while leaving the impression that we were taking everything he said seriously and then acting appropriately. It took a bit of time and finesse but in the end we became extremely adept at handling this particularly loathsome tenant!

Now, to compound issues somewhat, the Regional Office of the company that we worked for just happened to be located in one of the empty units on the first floor of the building that Jim and I both lived in and were responsible for maintaining. As well as annoying us on a daily basis, he also paid a visit to the girls working in the Regional Office every day. You have no idea what an utter treat this one tenant could be, never mind how much crap we were expected to suffer because of him, but suffer we did. At the end of the day, he was nothing more than a bit player in the bigger, more important picture – or so I thought. Work is work is work, and most of the time, it didn’t come home with me – so to speak. Obviously, when you work where you live and live where you work, it tends to be a little bit more difficult to keep the two separate, but this is certainly not impossible. I always ensured that there were very specific boundaries created with the tenants, and then, made sure that they were all very much aware of what these boundaries were. John would prove a bit challenging to these boundaries, and ultimately, because of him, Jim and I would find ourselves in a most untenable work situation!

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

A Very Long Overdue Rant

About thirteen months ago, my husband and I were victims of an unprovoked, and very random, attack by three unknown young men – at the time, they were 20, 22 and 23 years of age. The attack occurred while we were responding to what should have been a routine noise complaint made by one of the other tenants of the apartment building where we were Building Managers. Within seconds, it was all too apparent that this was anything but routine. What should have been fairly straightforward and quick to resolve, quickly escalated to a harrowing and extremely violent and savage beating and stabbing of my husband. While the blame obviously lies in the hands of the three young men who initiated this attack, I hold one of the the other tenants primarily responsible for the resulting escalation of violence. I strongly feel that is was his actions immediately prior to the attack that nearly ended up costing my husband his life. I’m very surprised that something similar had not actually happened before this, and while I still hold a huge amount of anger and resentment towards my husband’s attackers, there are times when I find myself angrier and extremely bitter towards this tenant. In the end, I suspect that I will find it easier to forgive the attackers before I will be able to forgive the tenant. Not only did his actions, immediately prior to the attack, do much to exascerbate an already potentially volatile situation, but his utter lack of action while we were being attacked and immediately after resulted in even greater injury to my husband.

This was his second complaint in less than 25 minuted that day to me regarding his neighbours. During his second call that day, I requested that he please give the police a call to issue a formal complaint against his neighbours. Generally regarding noise issues, the landlord, or his agent, is not really supposed to contact the police. At a later date, there is always the possibility that the tenant could end up charging the landlord with harassment, as well as a number of other things, because of this particulat type of action. It is preferable to have a third party make the noise complaint to the authorities, thus allowing the landlord to maintain his neutrality. In fact, the very fact that we were even receiving a noise complaint from one tenant against another tenant within the building was practically unheard of. This was, and still is, an exceptionally quiet and calm building. It is extremely unusual to hear noise of any kind. In fact, I can easily count on one hand, the number of noise complaints in total that we have even received since we began working here. This particular problem simply does not exist within this building. Kind of ironic when you think about it now, but the few noise complaints that we have actually received, surprisingly, have all come from the exact same tenant. Colour me surprised.

Shortly after Jim and I had started working as Building Managers at this property, we were contacted by this particular individual regarding a tenant that lived on the floor beneath his. On this particular afternoon, apparently, the tenant residing below him had been listening to here reggae music quite loudly – is this even possible? He requested that one of us go and investigate what was happening, so immediately upon hanging up the phone, off I went. As I arrived at the floor that the other tenant lived on, I witnessed the complaining tenant walking away from her unit. During this time, I also witnessed her response apparently to his direct involvement in this situation. She was shouting quite loudly at him through her closed door to “f**k off, leave her alone, stop coming to her door using his cane to knock loudly on it until she came to her door”. Hmmm, most interesting.

Typically, we encourage tenants not to get directly involved whatsoever with each other when it concerns any type of noise issues. Surprisingly, there is a tendancy for violence to develop between the two tenants. We strongly advise the complaining tenant to allow their Building Managers to handle this situation. We ask that they give us reasonable time to investigate said complaint, as well as time to resolve any issues associated with their complaint. This is pretty much the industry standard, and the majority of Building Managers do their damnest to adhere as much as possible to this procedure. Problem is that it is next to impossible to do this when you’ve got a loose cannon thrown into the equation. Lucky us, as this is exactly what this tenant is, a loose cannon – may I add at this time that I’m being very charitble describing him as such. He is the type of tenant that is utterly incapable of leaving well enough alone. He has to be right in the middle of everything, and generally ends up doing more harm than good, not to mention, undermining our job each and every step along the way. This guy in particular is really quite the piece of work. He is a walking cliche and stereotype come to life.

The day of our attack, I can easily imagine all sorts of petty and annoying things that he was bothering his neighbour about because this would be his way of getting back at them for their allegedly disruptive behavior. Not that his behaviour in any way excuses or remotely mitigates the other three individual’s subsequent violent actions towards Jim or myself. Not at all, but I wonder if what ultimately ended up happening that Monday afternoon just over a year ago, could have possibly been avoided entirely, not to mention allowed us to handle the situation differently then what ended up happening. I believe that are options for resolution ended up being rather limited, as well as being almost completely out of our control by this time. In the end, this resulted with us walking into a completely different situation than what we had expected and anticipated, and right from the outset, we were set up to fail somehow or someway because we only had the smallest of pictures, so tp speak. If it wasn’t bad enough that it was due to his actions towards his neighbour over the course of that particular afternoon ended up with is being attacked, he did absolutely nothing at all to help us in anyway while we were under attack.

Later on in the day, he was interviewed by one of our local tv reporters and what he said to the reporter ended up being played at each news broadcast over a three day period. He was able to describe to this report what actually had happened when we approached his neighbours door. He had a good enough view of us to recount how we had been given no chance at all from our attackers. He stated that after we had approached their door and knocked on it, the moment that their door opened, I was pushed off to the side, while Jim was charged and thrown violently up against the door across the hall from them. He said that we weren’t given any opportunity at all to even identify ourselves before they attacked. At least he confirmed part my statement that I ultimately gave to the police that it was a completely unprovoked and unwarranted attack against us. But that’s about all that he is good for as the only thing that I am able to bring away from this is that he was lying in wait for us to arrive at his neighbours door, essentially spying to see what was going to happen. Then after seeing how they ended up responding to us, rather than attempt to assist us in any way, and by any, I mean he didn’t even call 911 on our behalf. All he ended up doing was slamming his door and locking it behind him. Nice.

At one point during their attack against us, I found myself outside of his unit, screaming for help and pounding relentless on his door. When he did finally respond, all he did was open his door to quickly slam and lock it right in my face. Through the closed door, I remember scrreaming at him that they were killing my husband, and begging and pleading for him to either call for help or call downstairs to our main office. I understand that when he looked out into the hall, what he must have seen scared him half to death. I know it surely did me. At no time did I expect anyone to put their own lives in any sort of danger by actually physicallly assisting us, but I had hoped that somebody would pick up their bloody phone to call for help. Whatever…

Initially, I had actually doubted whether or not the complaining tenant was exaggerating the extent of his neighbour’s disruption on this particular afternoon, as his reputation preceeded him. Every high rise has this tenant, some even a few. They are the ones that know absolutely every little thing about their immediate neighbours, as well as the majority of tenants in the entire complex. Rarely are they ever satisfied with the property management nor their direct representatives, their Building Managers. The company can never do enough for them, whether it is ensuring the cleanliness of the property, its daily maintenance and upkeep or anything else that they could possibley think of bothering the office about. They feel entitled to getting a new paint job annually or new carpet or flooring or lighting or whatever, and goodness, don’t let them find out that another unit may have gotten an appliance replaced for whatever reason, like, perhaps after thirty years, a new stove was actually warranted. They are absolutely incapable of leaving you alone. On a daily basis, you can be assured that they will somehow find a way to contact you, and believe me, it will never be to pat you on the back for doing a kickass job either!

Every other tenant understands when asked to contact their Building Managers during business hours only. After hours is to be reserved for emergencies only. This tenant doesn’t care what time it is. When he has a bee in his bonnet, then this is the time. Who cares if it happens to be a Sunday evening before 11pm – or better yet, a Saturday morning before 7am. If he has decided that he just wants his first initial appearing on the tenant listing at the building’s entrance, rather than his full first name, then to him, this is very much an emergency and the moment this idiotic idea grips his tiny, narrow mind, he just has to let his BM know. To really drive home just how utterly self centred and egomaniacal this idiot is, he doesn’t even have a modicum of courtesy when he attempts to reach you. He couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to communicate said ridiculous request. Instead, to ensure that the BM’s entire family is disrupted, he actually goes directly to their unit and knocks loudly and relentlessly on their unit’s door – even though he could have also submitted a written request and dropped it through the door’s mail slot that I got hastily put up shortly after meeting said nuisance. Everyone else managed to adapt nicely and quickly to this alternate route for communication. In the end, of course, he had to because a policy was implemented that no request by a tenant would be addressed unless submitted in writing to either the property management or their agent, their Building Manager.

Anyway, I’m sure that you have more than enough information now to be able to draw your own picture of this tenant. Given the time and opportunity, I could easily go on and on about this tenant as he is truly that annoying. In the end, it was kind or ironic that he stopped being his normal daily nuisance around this place. I presume that somehow he was able to connect the dots to figure out that perhaps he played a larger role than he imagined in the violence against us. I’d like to think that when he heard the extent of my husband’s injuries combined with the near seven hours of emergency surgery that he had to endure immediately after the attack, not to mention the last rites he received from the family priest that day, that just for a moment, he felt a tinge of guilt or possibley a modicum of responsibilty for what had occurred. If he did, I doubt very much that it ended up lasting too long. His type can too easily dismiss away these intruding feelings pretty readily. Its second nature to them as they’ve had a lifetime of practice.

Go To Video Report of Stabbing From AChannel

I have set up a permanent page regarding the most recent news report from AChannel concerning the assault and stabbing of Jim on Monday. Click right HERE to check it out. Warning that there are a few very graphic images. 

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tHANK gOODNESS fOR cALL dISPLAY

Obviously, being a Building Manager of a reasonably large apartment building – 96 units over eight stories – you can absolutely be assured that there will certainly be some very special moments, not to mention a stereotypically odd assortment of characters residing within these eight floors. Some days are definitely easier than others, as are some tenants. Regardless of the individual, I always attempt to conduct myself with professionalism when it comes to their concerns, no matter how trivial or annoying. For the most part, I rarely find them irritating or annoying, but like everything else in life, there will always be an exception to the rule! Case in point would be the new tenant who recently moved into a unit on the second floor. Hmmm, for convenience, let us call him Kevin shall we.

Not the tiniest bit of exaggeration, but I have never met someone this annoying in my entire life. This dude has honestly gotten me beyond upset but which is something I rarely allow happen in respect to my job. Work is work is work, and most of the time, it doesn’t come home with me – so to speak. Obviously, when you work where you live and live where you work, it tends to be a little bit more difficult to keep the two separate, but certainly not impossible. You just need to ensure that your create very specific boundaries with the tenants and then make sure that they are very much aware of what these boundaries are. Normally when someone new moves into the building, they are each subjected to my standard lecture concerning our work hours and what would be considered appropriate times to contact us. I also remind them that my apartment is also my family’s home which means that it is a private residence. What this means then is that you just can’t come knocking on my front door whenever the mood strikes you, no matter how important you might think it is to do this. This normally takes a bit of time to sink in for some of them but usually after much reminding, it sinks in.

Lucky me though, Kevin just can’t seem to comprehend this particular detail, or simply doesn’t care, which I feel is more to the point. It is this that has got me so utterly worked up. His lease was dated for April 1, 2008 which generally translates into the day that you would be taking possession of your unit at which time you would then be able to start to move into it. Now, as this year this fell on a Tuesday, and he was moving from a city which is a two and a half hour drive away on a good day, I allowed him into his unit a few days earlier. Once again, I find whenever you do something nice for a tenant, they inevitably end up taking advantage of this, making me resent my generosity. Surprise, Kevin turned out to be no exception. I had told him that he could move in on the Saturday but midweek of the week he was to move in, he mentions to me that he had reserved his truck for the Friday. WTF? I told him that I suppose that would be fine seeing how he h ad already gone and reserved the vehicle.

Upon him moving in, there were a couple of minor concerns he had that he wanted addressed. Now, not a single one of them would be considered critical or serious or immediate – wanted door stoppers installed, items we actually happen to have in our storage room, but something that our company does not provide as standard as well as wanting all of the plates for his light switches and electrical outlets to be the same colour even though they were all the same colour in each separate room. He wanted additional caulking around his bathtub and kitchen counter but there was already caulking there and in all honesty, there was nothing wrong with it. There was also a satellite on the balcony adjoining his that he wanted to be able to access as he had some sort of way of hacking into it to get it for free. Excuse me but I am not about to give you keys to another unit regardless of whether or not it just happens to be empty at the moment. Whatever. I could literally go on and on and on but I’m actually starting to get bored.

Anyway, the weekend that he moved in just also happened to be the weekend that we were on duty, otherwise we rotate weekends with two other Building Managers – one on, then two off. He bothered us the entire weekend looking for one thing or another – shopping carts to help him move stuff or one of Jim’s dollies or whatever. I put up with this for the weekend even though he thought nothing of knocking on our door on the Sunday night after 10pm for one favour or another. Even Monday when he was calling my phone and knocking on our door at 9pm, I managed to keep my mouth shut. Tuesday still kept my trap shut but by Wednesday when he did this, I literally had to contain myself with every fiber so that I didn’t end up losing it on him. I lectured him as politely and firmly as I could letting him know that I worked from 9am until 5pm Monday to Friday if he needed to ask something. Fell on deaf ears apparently as he called me five times in a row tonight starting at 8:02pm. I ignored the phone, refusing to pick up as I had already spent a half an hour earlier this morning listening to go on about something.

Still trying to get into that empty unit but not going to happen. Also wants me to do something regarding the fact that there are no working jacks for his telephone in his unit. Five days in a row he has called regarding this one issue and each time I have responded exactly the same. The Regional Manager, my boss, informed me that we do not own the telephone lines in this building so there is nothing that we could do regarding this matter. That would be up to him and his telephone provider to work something out. Even right now, Jim is up there helping him move something and it is 9:30pm. Me, I’ve had more than enough of this clown for quite some time that’s for bloody sure.

P.S. I have just spent a panicked fifteen minutes searching for this entry. I was using one of those desktop blog editors to enter the content and for some reason when I went to publish it, the program deleted it for some reason. Duh! Could also have been operator error, it doesn’t really matter. Either way, I was near screwed as it takes me a near eternity to type something of this length cause I am a crap typist – took me almost an hour and a half to type the above so…NOW YOU HAD BETTER READ EACH AND EVERY WORD!!!

Victim of Crime Part II

So after Jim and I got home from the cop shop last Saturday, Sara mentioned that while she was out in the lobby mopping the floors – she recently got a part time job with the same company that Jim and I work for – some crazy lady approached her to ask her for a light for her smoke. Sara said that she did not have one and tried to return to her work. The next thing, she is chasing after this chick who apparently just took it upon herself to walk straight into our apartment. As Sara was going after her, Katie looked up from what she was reading and noticed this strange woman standing in the middle of our living room.

Both of them confronted her, demanding that she get out of our home ASAP. Good for them, yet still kind of creepy. The girls obviously shouldn’t have to worry about stuff like this either. Anyway, later on that day, I went up to work in the same unit that my purse had been taken from the night before. About a half an hour into my work there, I heard the handle of the front door. It was as if someone was shaking it or trying to get into the unit. I quietly walked down the hall to look out of the peep hole to see who it was but I couldn’t see anything. All of a sudden I heard Jim’s voice asking someone why they were trying to enter this unit.

As she was about to answer, I opened the door to see Jim and this obviously cracked out woman standing in the hall. From their right, I also noticed that Sara was now coming down the hall. I asked her if this was the same woman that was in our apartment earlier today and she said yes. I read the riot act to her, especially as she is not even a tenant of this apartment building – sadly, she is actually somebody’s mother!

I’ve had a couple of run ins with this lady. Recently, I found her standing in the middle of our lobby nodding off. I had to wake her up from her nod to find out what she was even doing there. To Jim’s earlier question, she had some lame answer that she thought that this was the apartment of the guy she was supposed to meet for dinner. A bloody likely story I might add. When I told this to my Regional Manager, she said that this individual had beern caught the week prior trying to get into units at the sister buiding right beside ours. She is now going to get a trespassing order taken out on her so that it will be illegal for her to even be on any of these properties.

I am pretty confident that she was the one that beat me for my purse that Friday night also. Nothing I can do about it now although I am sure glad that she didn’t get any cash from me.

Tags: LIFE, TENANTS, WORK

Victim of Crime

I can’t believe that this actually happened but last Friday night I had my purse stolen. What a bloody pain in the ass that this has turned out to be let me tell you. So far, I’ve managed to get a new bank card from my bank and even getting this done, proved to be near impossible. Seems that you need identification to get identification. Go figure!

It was partly my neglect that caused this to happen which of course, just ends up making me angrier. After work, Jim and I had gone over to the mall by our place to do a little bit of shopping. I wanted to get a new shower curtain and Jim wanted a new shower head. We ended up taking longer than I had wanted to and as the mall was extremely warm, I started to get a headache. Jim still wanted to grab a milkshake but by this time, I just wanted to go home so I headed off without him.

When I got back to our apartment, I realized that I hadn’t brought my keys with me so I was locked out of our unit. I did have two sets of keys from the empty units that I had been working in earlier in the day. I left a note on our door stating as I had forgotten my keys that when he got home, he could find me upstairs. No big deal really. Jim ended up getting back about twenty minutes after me.

He came upstairs and we ended up chilling up there for a bit as we had our portable stereo up there also.I had brought up most of our laundry to one of the empty units earlier in the week as the laundry room just happened to be on the same floor and I thought that it would be more convenient for me – plus it also meant that all of the dirty laundry was completely out of our apt!

Not even thinking, when I went down the hall to do some more laundry, I didn’t bother locking the apt’s door. All in all, I was probably gone no more than thirty minutes but I guess that was all of the time that this person needed to enter this empty apt, see my purse lying on the floor all by its little lonesome. Scoop…in and out in no time, I should imagine. Grrrr….

It actually wasn’t until Saturday morning that I ended up noticing that it was even missing. I searched all over the place even though I knew, once I had really thought about the previous evenings sequence of events, that I had never brought my purse back down to our unit when I was finished the laundry.

I even think that I know who it was that robbed me but I don’t have the time to go into the details right at the moment!!! Later on though…

PART TWO…TO BE CONTINUED…

Garage Sale

One of the fringe benefits or perks of being a Building Manager is the amount of cast off furniture and stuff in general that you ultimately get control over to keep or discard as you see fit. You would be truly amazed at the amount of stuff that gets left behind upon a move. Sometimes it is utterly mind boggling. The majority of stuff is pure crap and the only fate awaiting it is the garbage heap. It was left behind in most cases because the tenant was too darn lazy to get rid of it himself. 

But every once in awhile, you happen upon a real treasure, something that you simply can’t pass up. I found a dining room set this week that fits this category to a T. Made of real teak, the tenant left behind four matching chairs plus the oval table, insert and all, because he has to give up his apartment to move in with his daughter. He, unfortunately, is unable to bring the majority of his furniture with him as she already has a fully furnished home. He has maintained his possessions exquisitely also.

Recently I’ve happened upon some iffy stuff – some side tables and bookcases that have most definitely seen better days – but with a little bit of paint and tidying up,  have managed to transform them into items you’d be happy to have in your home! I am actually getting pretty good at sprucing stuff up. Most of this stuff I have rescued for the girl’s room so I’ve been able to let my creative juices really flow by painting them really funky colors.