Overly Verbal

If I’m counting correctly (which I may not be, because being furious definitely prevents my spelling correctly, and may very well prevent my counting accurately), I only have to spend 45 more days living in the ghetto. And that last day won’t be so much living here as it will be loading a truck with my things so that I can no longer live here, so I’m going to call it 44 days. And 44 days is roughly 1,050 hours, and all I have to do now is figure out how much patience I have remaining and see whether I can’t stretch it out so that it lasts 1,050 hours.

Yesterday I received a very odd message from the owner of the property I live in now, indicating that I had not paid my rent for November, and explaining that my failure to pay the rent in a timely fashion was the reason the property I live in now cannot be maintained to my satisfaction. And I was rather rudely accused of having ignored repeated contact from the newly engaged property management company requesting that I paid my rent. Thing is, I had not only paid my rent for November, I had paid it early, and received a letter from the property management company thanking me for my timely payment. Not only that, but I hadn’t received a single communication from this company after that letter was received.

Clearly, there was a breakdown in communication somewhere, if my point of contact at the property management company not only believes that I didn’t pay my rent, but also believes he repeatedly contacted me and asked me to pay my rent, when I believe he didn’t.

So here’s how I would have handled the situation, if I was a property owner, and my contact at the property management company that I had engaged told me he had not received any rent for the month of November. First, I would have called my tenant and said, “I just talked to the guy at the company, and he says he didn’t receive the rent. I’m quite sure that because you are a sensible person you would not deliberately withhold rent, knowing that my financial situation is precarious, so let’s figure out what happened, eh?” That sort of communication, as opposed to hostility and accusations, tends to lead toward a more satisfactory outcome for everyone.

Then, I would have learned that the property management company has at least one employee who believes my tenant paid the rent, but another employee who believes the tenant had not. This to me would indicate that the company has some record-keeping difficulties (that lead to financial difficulties on my part), and I would have disengaged the company, because their services did not please me.

Then I would have apologized to my tenant for having had to make her prove that she had paid her rent. (But I wouldn’t have had to apologize to her for having assumed she was wrong, because I wouldn’t have. See how much easier it is to handle things my way?)

Then again, I approach the world differently than other people do. I’m all rational-like, except for the part where I assume people have the best intentions until they prove otherwise. And I naturally assume that in any given conflict between an individual and a giant conglomerate whose job it is to collect money, the individual is probably the one I can trust more.

So it’s Veteran’s Day, and as usual I’ll be remembering people I know and have known who served and are serving our country. But this year I’m also reflecting on the fact that any given soldier cannot be held responsible for the actions of our entire military, and no matter what you think about how our country conducts itself, each soldier deserves to be treated with the respect that his or her position holds. The flip side of that, of course, is that the individual actions of any given soldier reflect not only on our military, but on other soldiers as well - our soldiers therefore have the responsibility and duty to conduct themselves, both in uniform and out, with at least a modicum of decency. While it can be a great disappointment when one does not, I will not let the words, actions, and behavior of one person diminish the good that other people he is aligned with have done and are doing.

And that is all.