Looks Can Be Deceiving

Okay, is everyone ready for another bizarre story? I realize most of these stories, like most things in my life, will be thought of as odd. Well, working at an apartment complex is truly an odd job. There are so many things that we find out because we are dealing with people’s lives, their homes, and every aspect of it. Sure, there are residents that I could only tell you the basics, like whether they are students or professionals, whether they have kids or their significant others living with them, or if they just live by themselves. I can pick out the partiers from the non-partiers. However, when I find out something completely off the wall about them, they truly stand out in my mind.

This situation happened a few years ago, when I had recently become the Leasing Manager. There was a woman, she was very sweet, had a three year old son, and enjoyed hanging out at the pool with him. She had even taken a ten year old boy under her wing. This young boy was always left alone by his mother since she worked all the time, so this lady volunteered to babysit him for free after school since she was just hanging out with her son anyway. She actually lived in the building next to me, and everything was going well… until the day she decided to renew her lease.

She signed her new lease agreement one day, and then a few hours later came into the office to see if she could get a letter written from me saying how much her rent is each month in order to show it to the daycare her son would be starting soon. The problem with this was, she gave me a different name. I noticed the difference and she admitted that the girl that had applied for the apartment over the internet had to move into a halfway house before her lease started, so they had an agreement that she would just move in for her, with the lease still in her name so she didn’t have to pay extra to re-lease the apartment to her. I informed her that this was against our rules and that she would need to apply to be on a lease by herself. She completed the application, and what I found out horrified me.

While I won’t go into specifics on what the background check pulled up, I will say that I believed she was supposed to notify the public of her address because she had been convicted of sex offenses. I quickly notified my property manager of the situation and her response was that she needed to move out within twenty four hours. I pleaded that we notify the police since she had committed forgery and just in case she was back to her old ways, in terms of the crimes she had committed. My boss decided it was best for everyone if she were to just leave quietly.

To this day, I still wonder what became of this resident. I wonder if she had, in fact, committed more crimes while living there. I sometimes feel guilty because if she did harm anyone, maybe it could have been prevented if we had just checked her ID on the day she moved in. I guess it was just a lesson that I need to be more suspicious of people and that not everyone is as good as they claim to be. So everyone, don’t judge a book by its cover. Oh yeah, I’ll leave it like I left the last blog. Be nice to your landlords, you never know what is on their minds and what they are dealing with “behind the scenes.”