Apartment drama

My apartment used to be operated by two leasing agents and an onsite resident manager. All three were a pleasure the few times we needed their help.

In the past month for various reasons, all three have been replaced. We currently have one leasing manager and she has one assistant. Although the leasing manager lives in the building, she is not a resident manager, which kinda sucks.

Our apartment has two lofts. A spiral staircase leads to one, which we use as a bedroom. The other loft is used for storage - it’s about 100 square feet and accessible with an aluminum ladder.

The previous resident used that space for an office - they had a computer desk and chair set up. We I have too much shit to accommodate that but it makes for a great place to keep bikes, boxes, etc…

The ladder was in our apartment when we moved in. It was in the apartment when we toured when the previous resident was in the unit. We have been in the unit for a few months now and use the ladder frequently, initially stashing and retrieving bikes, lately retrieving tools, computer parts, etc that I need.

Two weeks ago we came home to a note on our counter.

We borrowed your ladder

- Maintenance

OK, we thought.

A day or few went by.

Amanda stopped by the building office (hard to do, they seem to never be open anymore) and talked to the new leasing manager. Apparently the ladder was the buildings’ ladder, not ours, and we could borrow it if we wanted to. Amanda was perplexed.

Yesterday I stopped in to verify this insanity after talking with a few other residents who all said things along the lines of “what, are they going to borrow your dishwasher next?” and met the new leasing manager myself.

Rough Transcript:

introductions, very friendly

“So I just wanted to stop by and ask about our ladder.”

“Your ladder?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in our unit before but but we have a loft that we use for storage, and we’ve had an aluminum ladder going up to it since we moved in. There was a note from maintenance that they’d ‘borrowed it’, I guess from $name-of-the-only-maintenance worker? We never got it back.”

“OK”. She then got on her cell phone, apparently to the maintenance man. “Yes, I have a person here that was under the impression that the ladder that was in their unit was part of their apartment… OK…. right… OK I’ll explain that to him… right… oh he has a package?” She then starts digging through a huge pile of boxes that I’d walked past and not noticed on the way in. “OK… right, thanks.”

“That ladder wasn’t part of the unit, maintenance just had it there while they were checking on the air conditioning, he says”.

“It was there when we moved in. I don’t understand”,

“You can borrow it if you want. He will bring it over this afternoon”.

“Borrow it? We’ve had it for months”