For most people, the last 2 years will be remembered as one of the worst times in recent history for renting a pad. Jenny, however, is not most people. She’s a property manager and thanks to Perth’s vacancy rate dipping she can get back to performing her job with the enthusiasm of Kermit the Frog being invited to take a tour of a French kitchen.
She takes the firm attitude that anyone renting a property she manages should be on their hands & knees thanking her for accepting their application. If they don’t like it then too bad, plenty more renting chumps to fill their place.
It’s 11 am on a Wednesday and Jenny is flat out. She’s waiting for her latte to cool down, applying nail polish and looking online for a new playsuit for her next bottomless brunch session. So you can imagine her frustration at the receptionist trying to put through a call of a tenant who has been trying to reach her all morning.
She sighs audibly as she takes the call. Turns out, the tenant has been desperately trying to get ahold of her to organise a plumber as his toilet has decided to do its best impression of Willy Wonka’s chocky river.
Having to call and organise a tradesman has agitated Jenny to the point of vindictive bitchery. She shoves half a packet of Tim Tams in her gob while delegating the duty to an already swamped junior staff member.
She storms outside and lights up a menthol cigarette. Her Spendless heels clop as she paces back and forth thinking of ways to destroy this man’s life. You’d feel the same if you lost a bid on eBay because you had to briefly perform your job.
Suddenly, she is hit by a lightning bolt of petty delight. This tenant who couldn’t live in a volcano of shit for 30 more minutes has a rental inspection coming up. So she is going to conduct the inspection with the sort of OCD grade pedanticism you could expect from a grammar Nazi in a Perthnow comment’s section.
On inspection day, Jenny ignores every phone call from the tenant who was seeking to find out what time she would be at his house. She fires off a text message, “as our email stated, between 9 am – 5 pm, please read ALL emails from this office”.
She storms through the door in ill-fitting faux-business gear that has the effortless sophistication of a hen’s party drinking out of dick-shaped straws in the back of a stretch hummer. Luckily for Jenny, the tenant couldn’t take a whole day off work just to be there for 10mins, so she has the place to herself.
Despite her most maniacal efforts, she only discovers a few minor indiscretions. This prick has done a better job cleaning up than Alf Steward before a segment of Better Home & Basements. She is pissed, after all, it’s hard to power trip off such a limited supply of bitch-tricity.
She notes that the man has left a few plates in his drying rack, a couple of cobwebs and a bit of dust on bedroom windowsill. She can already see the words she is going to write when she sends him a warning letter that if these problems are remedied she is going to chokeslam his lease into a bag of eviction-dicks.
She isn’t done yet. She is still unsatisfied. After all, this dude did take a bit of a tone with her when his 4 phone calls and 2 emails were ignored all morning. So she digs deep into her bag of tricks and has just the ticket.
She gets back to the office and in addition to the unsatisfactory property inspection report, she tells the man he is liable for the cost of the plumber as maintaining pipes is the duty of the tenant.
Now all that’s left to do is sit back and ignore all the angry phone calls for the man trying to get some clarification on this outrageous demand. This is her life fuel. She feeds off it.
Documenting the Human Zoo is thirsty work, so if you enjoyed what you read how about buying Belle a beer, ay?