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Apologies if this is in the wrong section. Still feeling my way around here.
This is not my personal story, but rather my best friend. He relates once in a while and we laugh about it now, but this is a story of how someone almost got beheaded because of a landlord's ignorance. (or landlord's wife, more likely)
"M" had been living for about 2 years in the bottom half of a house. Another friend of ours rented the upstairs. M is not a raging slob, even by "single guy" standards, and rarely had any issues with the landlord. I've met the landlord since then and he seems like a really cool guy. The only problem M had was that the landlord wasn't always easy to get a hold of. (having a full-time office job, he used the house as some additional income)
So the landlord decides he's going to sell the building. This is not a big deal... except for the fact that he never told M people were going to start coming over and viewing the house, plus there was never a For Sale sign put on the front lawn... not at first, anyway.
At this point I should describe the street M lived on. It's a block long, stretching from the main street in his town (a nice, mostly middle-class town) down to a street that runs parallel to the train tracks. One the other side of the street is a bar supply place, the parking lot for a bar, some business that did industrial electrical installation and a little house with a family of four. No problems there except sometimes idiotic drunken drivers leaving the bar at night... and on busy days like Superbowl Sunday or St. Pat's Day sometimes morons would park in front of (or IN!) M's driveway. That only happened a couple of times and it was remedied quickly.
On M's side of the block was about 4 other houses. A couple were decent little places. The house to his left was split up into 2 apartments plus a basement apartment. Unfortunately, the guy in the basement was some sort of drunk/drug user and sometimes made a racket. But he never started any crap with M, so that was okay.
The house to his right we called the Cathouse. The people who lived there were borderline hoarding personality, if you happen to know what that is. It's an area of interest of mine from my psychology days. They were definitely some sort of drug users, too. (the cops would typically visit there once every other week over noise, drug use, fights, or other idiocy) These folks would put out cat food for a bunch of local strays, which encouraged them to hang around all the time, breeding uncontrollably, and getting all sorts of disease because they were mostly feral and without veterinary care. I don't care if someone has a hundred cats, as long as they take proper care of them. So M had to call the health department and eventually they told the Cathouse people that they could only have 2 cats and any more would result in them being fined X dollars per day per cat. Well, they kept encouraging the loose cats (plus deputies found a dead kitten IN the house!) so they ended up getting a bunch of fines levied against the house. At some point one or more of them moved out.
That was a little lengthy, but it's important to the story as a whole: M had druggie lunatics living on each side of him.
M worked roughly 9 - 5 but did so at a hospital that was a solid 40 - 50 minute drive, so had to be up early and sometimes came pulling in fairly late. As such, he would sleep in weekends... until 9 - 10am or longer. Plus he was still in the "gamer" mindset and might stay up until 2am playing video games or download from the net.
So one Saturday morning at 8:30am he awakens to a noise in his home. Groggy, M looked through the crack between his bedroom door and the door frame to see someone standing at the end of the little hallway looking in a closet. His bedroom door was one end of the hall, which was around 12 feet long, and the closet was at the opposite end. The bathroom was to the right and the doorway that went into the dining room/living room area was to the left. Not recognizing the person in his closet as the landlord or our friend upstairs, M grabbed a machete (we're both something of weapons collectors... having an avid interest in medieval weapons mostly, but M has a few knives and machetes and I collect katannas) M opened to door from his bedroom and was walking up to the guy looking in his closet and, had the REAL ESTATE AGENT not stepped through the doorway just then, was about to bring the machete down on the back of the PROSPECTIVE BUYER'S HEAD.
The landlord and the landlord's wife (who we later discovered was a true ultra-bitch) NEVER bothered to call M to let him know someone would be looking at the house. He kept both his cell phone and cordless home phone (which was fully charged and working at the time - he checked) on the shelf right next to his head. Caller ID confirmed NO ONE ever called him, either the landlord or the real estate company, to let him know someone was coming over first thing in the morning.
Now, I'm not trying to start any sort of debate on the legality of someone getting decapitated by a groggy homeowner... the point is: the landlord and real estate company never called to let M know that someone would be there and the would-be seller came close to death or severe injury because of it.
Oh, but that's not the end.
A couple of weeks later, either an agent or someone being shown around the house when M wasn't there knocked over a limited edition Lord of the Rings book end and broke it. Between the machete incident and now his property being damaged, M had quite enough and made the landlord promise to confirm all appointments with him first and only show the house when M was there or with the landlord or the landlord's wife being present if M was not home. The landlord's wife pitched a fit, but the landlord agreed to it.
M managed to find a new place about two months later and moved. A couple of weeks after that someone purchased the house. (not the guy who almost got beheaded)
It pretty much worked out okay for everyone... landlord sold the property, M ended up doing a rent-to-own thing on his house and is now a proud homeowner, the people in the Cathouse are long since gone, there are no more feral cats in the area, and no one got decapitated.
This is not my personal story, but rather my best friend. He relates once in a while and we laugh about it now, but this is a story of how someone almost got beheaded because of a landlord's ignorance. (or landlord's wife, more likely)
"M" had been living for about 2 years in the bottom half of a house. Another friend of ours rented the upstairs. M is not a raging slob, even by "single guy" standards, and rarely had any issues with the landlord. I've met the landlord since then and he seems like a really cool guy. The only problem M had was that the landlord wasn't always easy to get a hold of. (having a full-time office job, he used the house as some additional income)
So the landlord decides he's going to sell the building. This is not a big deal... except for the fact that he never told M people were going to start coming over and viewing the house, plus there was never a For Sale sign put on the front lawn... not at first, anyway.
At this point I should describe the street M lived on. It's a block long, stretching from the main street in his town (a nice, mostly middle-class town) down to a street that runs parallel to the train tracks. One the other side of the street is a bar supply place, the parking lot for a bar, some business that did industrial electrical installation and a little house with a family of four. No problems there except sometimes idiotic drunken drivers leaving the bar at night... and on busy days like Superbowl Sunday or St. Pat's Day sometimes morons would park in front of (or IN!) M's driveway. That only happened a couple of times and it was remedied quickly.
On M's side of the block was about 4 other houses. A couple were decent little places. The house to his left was split up into 2 apartments plus a basement apartment. Unfortunately, the guy in the basement was some sort of drunk/drug user and sometimes made a racket. But he never started any crap with M, so that was okay.
The house to his right we called the Cathouse. The people who lived there were borderline hoarding personality, if you happen to know what that is. It's an area of interest of mine from my psychology days. They were definitely some sort of drug users, too. (the cops would typically visit there once every other week over noise, drug use, fights, or other idiocy) These folks would put out cat food for a bunch of local strays, which encouraged them to hang around all the time, breeding uncontrollably, and getting all sorts of disease because they were mostly feral and without veterinary care. I don't care if someone has a hundred cats, as long as they take proper care of them. So M had to call the health department and eventually they told the Cathouse people that they could only have 2 cats and any more would result in them being fined X dollars per day per cat. Well, they kept encouraging the loose cats (plus deputies found a dead kitten IN the house!) so they ended up getting a bunch of fines levied against the house. At some point one or more of them moved out.
That was a little lengthy, but it's important to the story as a whole: M had druggie lunatics living on each side of him.
M worked roughly 9 - 5 but did so at a hospital that was a solid 40 - 50 minute drive, so had to be up early and sometimes came pulling in fairly late. As such, he would sleep in weekends... until 9 - 10am or longer. Plus he was still in the "gamer" mindset and might stay up until 2am playing video games or download from the net.
So one Saturday morning at 8:30am he awakens to a noise in his home. Groggy, M looked through the crack between his bedroom door and the door frame to see someone standing at the end of the little hallway looking in a closet. His bedroom door was one end of the hall, which was around 12 feet long, and the closet was at the opposite end. The bathroom was to the right and the doorway that went into the dining room/living room area was to the left. Not recognizing the person in his closet as the landlord or our friend upstairs, M grabbed a machete (we're both something of weapons collectors... having an avid interest in medieval weapons mostly, but M has a few knives and machetes and I collect katannas) M opened to door from his bedroom and was walking up to the guy looking in his closet and, had the REAL ESTATE AGENT not stepped through the doorway just then, was about to bring the machete down on the back of the PROSPECTIVE BUYER'S HEAD.
The landlord and the landlord's wife (who we later discovered was a true ultra-bitch) NEVER bothered to call M to let him know someone would be looking at the house. He kept both his cell phone and cordless home phone (which was fully charged and working at the time - he checked) on the shelf right next to his head. Caller ID confirmed NO ONE ever called him, either the landlord or the real estate company, to let him know someone was coming over first thing in the morning.
Now, I'm not trying to start any sort of debate on the legality of someone getting decapitated by a groggy homeowner... the point is: the landlord and real estate company never called to let M know that someone would be there and the would-be seller came close to death or severe injury because of it.
Oh, but that's not the end.
A couple of weeks later, either an agent or someone being shown around the house when M wasn't there knocked over a limited edition Lord of the Rings book end and broke it. Between the machete incident and now his property being damaged, M had quite enough and made the landlord promise to confirm all appointments with him first and only show the house when M was there or with the landlord or the landlord's wife being present if M was not home. The landlord's wife pitched a fit, but the landlord agreed to it.
M managed to find a new place about two months later and moved. A couple of weeks after that someone purchased the house. (not the guy who almost got beheaded)
It pretty much worked out okay for everyone... landlord sold the property, M ended up doing a rent-to-own thing on his house and is now a proud homeowner, the people in the Cathouse are long since gone, there are no more feral cats in the area, and no one got decapitated.
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