Residents/Management Meeting

Yesterday’s Residents/Management meeting was civil, jovial even –- that is until a resident brought up the pit bull. Not much got said because the Community Manager refused to discuss it, allow discussion about it and quickly changed the subject.

She was, however, willing to discuss the departure of Assistant Maintenance Guy (AMG), saying she was only doing so because she wanted to dispel the rumor that he was fired.

Body language speaks volumes. She looked down, rather than out at the crowd, while saying, “He had some issues he had to take care of. We were actually very sad. We took it hard as a team. He brightened up our day.”

I did hear from a reliable source that Community Manager had cried when AMG left. That she’d hoped writing him up was enough, but Corporate was pushing to have him fired, so he quit rather than wait to be axed.

I still think he should have let it happen so he could at least collect unemployment, but there’s no one but himself to blame. He let his pride and ego lead him into battling when he should have just sucked it up, put on a game face and played the game as I learned from experience is how you survive in a corporate culture when you’re a minority.

Community Manager has a soft heart. In addition to managing this complex, she has a husband, small children, is a youth minister at her church. She’s a nurturer. And all this caring and support of others -- getting involved in the lives of residents to the degree she does, is cause to worry about her own health problems and well-being as she tries to navigate between nurturing us residents and her staff while pleasing Corporate.

It’s obvious how heavily AMG’s departure weighs on her, because she mentioned him several times during the meeting. First to explain why there’s a backlog in handling maintenance requests -- because AMG isn’t here and he was fast she said; and second to explain why no one was doing this that and the other -- again she said because AMG is no longer here. Also, when a resident entered the room well after we were on to other topics, she felt compelled to let that person know the departure of AMG had been discussed, and “He was not fired. He had other things to do.”

Community Manager also touched on the dead guy, saying only “Mr. G______ passed”, and that some of his furniture was given to a new resident who “Literally has nothing”.

Again with the nurturing, she asked if we had items to donate to this new resident.

Also discussed was the laundry room.

I’d been wondering why I was sleeping straight through and not being awakened by someone doing laundry at 3:30 in the morning. Not since I’d convinced my downstairs neighbor that was where the sound disturbing her peace was coming from, that it was not me roaming round at 3:30, have I heard a sound from the Laundry Room.

Turns out there’s a master lock on the Laundry Room door – the lock we do not have a key for, and Apache has been going around locking that master in all the Laundry Rooms at 10PM, reopening at 7 AM.

How in the world did they get a resident to perform this duty … a resident who pays for his unit when we have Head Maintenance Guy and Assistant Community Manager living here rent free?

How wacked is that?

One of the two can’t do it?

I’ll have to ask Apache how he got roped into this. I have a sneaky suspicion the office used my name. I never complained about the sound, that was Little Miss Looney downstairs who did the complaining. But if the office told Apache I’d mentioned to Looney that I’d been awakened as well, being as protective of me as he is, he would have agreed to do it.

At any rate, Apache doesn’t seem to mind, but they should at least take something off his rent for putting himself out like that. 

Other announcements were an Easter Potluck on April 3.

Inasmuch as this is Activity Director’s event, I wonder if it’ll be something illogical like sandwiches or hotdogs again.

I’m done with her tacky potlucks, so I’m out. Probably won't even do a walk-thru to take photos for our Facebook page.

Lastly, the complex passed that super bowl of government inspection.

That’s good news for Community Manager because Corporate was all over her about the necessity to pass to the point where it looked like her job depended on it.

Out of the 178 units on this complex, only 24 were inspected at random. Community Manager said, with the exception of two units that were “very disappointing”, she was “impressed” with how well residents maintained their units.