#by /u/DeadlyGerbil

[prorevenge]

Bad landlord scams his tenants, goes to jail.

Many years ago, when I worked for a rent-to-own company in a small town, there was a little apartment complex which we made frequent deliveries to, and just as frequently had to repo from. It had been a motel when it was built, and the owner turned it into apartments by just making doorways in the walls between rooms, putting a kitchen and living room in one and a bedroom in the other. The place was very run-down and apparently pretty inexpensive, and based on a few things customers said, it seemed that the majority of the tenants moved in there for short times. I figured it was because they were waiting for prefab houses to be financed and delivered, since the vast majority of housing in that town was mobile homes. Turns out I was wrong, but more on that later.

Between deliveries and pickups, we were visiting this place multiple times per month, but the landlord wouldn't let us park the truck in the parking lot to do it. It was a motel parking lot, so there was way more space than the tenants needed, and plenty of room for our truck, but the minute we pulled into the lot, the landlord would come running out of the office and yell at us to get the truck off his property. We were still allowed to deliver and such, we just had to carry the couches and old-style rear-projection big-screen TVs across the gravel lot from a truck parked on the street. It was more than a little annoying.

Then the day came that I was visiting some customers, a young couple, to have them sign an extension because they couldn't make their payment, and I saw an eviction notice on their door. I knocked, they answered, and then they, too, saw the notice. They explained that they needed the extension because they were behind on rent, but the eviction was unexpected because they were only two days late. The notice gave them one week to move out. They signed the extension and I left, a little suspicious because that didn't seem right to me.

A few days later, I got a call from the couple saying they needed to return the stuff they'd rented because they were being evicted and had to move to a motel. I told them to wait there, I'd be over in an hour.

My wife had worked in the rental office of our previous apartment complex, so I knew some tenant laws. When I'd checked after getting the extension signed, I found that evictions couldn't be served with only a week notice, they had to give 30 days for the tenants to pay or move out. If they moved out, the landlord could take any unpaid rent out of their security deposit. This was a small town with lots of mobile homes, so I'm guessing the law was to prevent people being evicted from rented land on which they had a mobile home they owned, but it applied to apartments, too.

Normally, I'd have considered this none of my business, but everyone in our store hated that landlord and wanted to get back at him, so I printed out the applicable rental law pages from the town's website and drove over to the apartment complex. There, I knocked on the door of every one of our customers living there, which was about half of the 20 or so apartments, and gave them a copy of the law. While doing this, I learned that the landlord had been evicting people like that for being even a day late, then keeping their deposits, citing the very law I was giving to my customers, just not the part about 30 days leeway. He charged rent in advance (you paid for the next month at the end of each month), so people were losing their deposits over being one day late. On top of that, the landlord wouldn't accept late payments, even if they were before his scheduled eviction time, because he made more money by evicting people and moving someone new in, since he kept all their deposits.

I told the couple that had started all this that if I were them, I wouldn't move out, and I'd contact a lawyer or at least the city housing department and file a complaint. They were worried because the landlord had said he'd have the sheriff's department evict them if they didn't move out in time (there were no local police--small town), but I said that even if the landlord called them, I doubted they'd actually evict them if they cited the law. That was about all I could do, and I hoped it'd be enough.

It was. The couple came in a few weeks later to pay for their rental furniture and to thank me for all my help, telling me the landlord had just been arrested. They'd filed a complaint, and when the landlord called the sheriff to evict them, it had kicked off an investigation. I never learned what exactly the charges were, or what happened to the landlord, but the complex ended up under new ownership, and the new manager had no problem with us parking on their property for deliveries. Also, the number of our repos and deliveries there suddenly dropped, because people were no longer being evicted constantly.

Between that experience and other stories I've read online, I never cease to be baffled and annoyed that people don't know their rights as tenants. Check your laws, don't take a landlord's word for anything, and stand up for yourself!

(source) story by (/u/DeadlyGerbil)

[prorevenge]

Some people make it easy to ruin their life.

Many years ago, I got a job running a small store in a national franchise. I'd worked for the company for about a year in lesser roles, but got promoted to general manager when an infamously non-profitable store lost yet another manager.

In switching to this new store, I also changed regions, and was now working under a different regional manager than the one who had hired me. We'll call him Jay.

Jay was terrible at his job. When I took over the store, he was supposed to help me do inventory to make sure nothing was missing that I could be held accountable for. Instead, he had the exiting manager do it, which is exactly the last thing you want.

I whipped the store into shape, fired one employee, promoted another to his place, and hired on someone to fill a role that had been empty for months. I sold off merchandise that had been sitting in the back room for years. The whole time, Jay would nag and micromanage me, even coming in and having my employees stop doing their jobs so they could change around my merchandise displays. I worked 6-day weeks, probably 75-80 hours (salaried), but even so, Jay sometimes made me come in and open the store on Sundays to essentially just sit in an empty store because everyone knew we were normally closed on Sundays.

About 2 months into my new job, Jay took a few hundred dollars in cash out of my store's till as petty cash. He said he would replace it with a receipt, as is standard with petty cash, but a month went by, and I was still missing the money.

The store's annual audit was the next month, but the auditor took Jay's word that he would get a receipt for the petty cash and let it slide. Then, at the beginning of month 4, Jay tried to demote me.

As part of my store, I had set up a whole section of one wall to display all the different laptops we carried, one of each. Each one was secured with a steel cable. Jay told me to put more laptops out. I told him I didn't have enough security cables, and anyway, we had one of each model, so it was unnecessary. When I went to lunch, Jay had my employees put out a dozen more laptops, unsecured, and told me to keep it that way. A week later, a guy walked into the store, grabbed an unsecured laptop, and bolted out the door.

Jay acted furious that I'd let someone steal a laptop. He said I was going to go back to my old job, but at a different store in his region. I politely pointed out that the previous month, my third at the store, was the first time in 3 years that the store had actually turned a profit. Jay backed down. He still hadn't replaced the petty cash.

Nothing happened for a while because Jay was in the hospital. He would occasionally call, and his voice was raspy and hoarse, and we all figured he had the flu.

Month 5 rolls around. Jay is back at work and micromanaging me as usual. After a very late night, I leave, leaving my assistant manager to close up, as I'd done many times before. Said AM was in line for his own store as soon a position opened up, and had been with the company several years longer than me, so he knew his business. Unfortunately, he forgot to set the security bar on the loading dock doors, and even more unfortunately, that happened to be the night someone tried to break in. They hooked a chain to the doors and used a truck to rip them open and steal a couple thousand dollars' worth of TVs. I don't know if the security bar would have stopped them, but of course Jay decided it was all my fault.

Jay went on a tear about how I'd failed to secure the store, and that on top of the stolen laptop (which, remember, was Jay's fault), that was too much and this time I was being demoted for sure. I was sick of his crap and quit.

A couple days later, I contacted the national office and informed them of the missing money from what used to be my store. I figured Jay would get investigated and have to come up with the money and that'd be it, but it was the only way I could think to get back at him.

A few weeks later, my original regional manager called me up and offered me my job back, saying he had taken over Jay's region because Jay had been let go. I declined, as I'd found a job that paid almost as much and I only had to work 40 hours a week. This did prompt me to go visit my old store, though.

When I got to the store, I found all my same people still there, and my AM was now GM. He told me the whole story. A few days after I'd left, someone from home office called the store and started asking the AM questions about Jay. Jay was sitting right in the next room, so the AM found it very harrowing, but he told the guy what had happened with the laptop, the break-in, and the missing money. Apparently, the home office guy investigated all of Jay's stores and found a bunch of other shady things had happened at the other ones, too. I was just the only manager who had tried to hold Jay accountable.

Jay was fired, of course. He then tried to commit suicide, but survived. That's when it came out that that time Jay had been sick with the raspy voice, it had been because he'd tried to kill himself with car exhaust, but someone found him and called 911.

A few months later, I stopped by another of the stores in the area, run by a guy I'd worked with before I'd worked under Jay. The guy told me that Jay had gotten hired on by one of our competitors, stolen several thousand dollars, and fled the state. I also learned that the reason Jay had worked in the area in the first place was because his family was there, so they'd split off a chunk of the region I'd been hired into just so Jay could work in the area and be near his family. Now he has a warrant on him for grant theft if he ever returns.

(source) story by (/u/DeadlyGerbil)