I’ll be the first to admit that the apartments I live in are far from “luxury”. We are on, I think, our third management company in as many years. And they seem to go through accountants like hookers go through doses of penicillin. What irks me, though, is their incompetence leads to me being erroneously called out as a deadbeat.
Every few months, I get a delinquent notice from the accountant. It shouldn’t faze me, but it ALWAYS upsets me. I pay my rent and utilities on time (most of the time EARLY) and in full every month and yet, I’ll bet there are a dozen delinquent notices languishing in my rental file. Each and every one of them an error on the part of the management company. And I am willing to bet that if anyone ever calls them for a rental reference, those delinquent notices will be mentioned (without a word about the fact that they were ALL errors).
Friday, I returned home from work to find the latest notice stuck to my door. All the invoice said was “Previous balance” and an amount. It had my address from before I moved three years ago. The city in the return address was spelled incorrectly and it directed that “Balance need to be pay inmmediately”. No indication of what the invoice was for and, of course, no one in the office on the weekend can tell you what it was for.
The accountant called me this morning and told me it was a past due notice for utilities. Now, the Past Due Notice was DATED the 11th. The utility bill “due date” was the 14th. I PAID the utilities on the 13th. Yet, on the 11th, I was sent a PAST DUE notice. When I mentioned that the utility bill due date was the 14th, she said “oh, yes… hmmm, I do see that here”… Maybe, just maybe, you should have looked at the due date BEFORE you sent a “Past Due” notice. Just a thought. She said she would make a note in the system that the bill was paid even though the check wasn’t cashed yet. ARE YOU SERIOUS? I don’t even GET the bill until the 12th, I pay it on the 13th but you’ll be magnanimous and mark it paid even though the check hasn’t yet been cashed? So, am I supposed to be able to prognosticate the amount due before I get the bill (and the bills vary drastically from month to month) and pay it a week or two early to avoid a past due notice that is dated before the bill is even due?
She asked, before we hung up, “is there anything else I can do for you”? No, because you can’t give me back the three nights of sleep I lost being angry and upset about this. What you can do for me is not bill me erroneously anymore. What you can do is provide me with a WRITTEN apology and put it into my rental file. If you can’t muster up an apology, at least a written acknowledgment that you were in error and that I am NOT the deadbeat you seem dead set on portraying me as.
For now, I am going to work on getting my blood pressure and pulse rate back to something that resembles normal. Until the next error (which I know won’t be long in coming…)
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