People...

On 2007-10-07 08:04:24 -0700, Jay Honeck said:

For those of you who exist in the clarified, rarified world of upper-
echelon corporate life, or hang out with pilots all day, it's hard to
remember the wide range of human behaviors that exist. I, too, once
existed there, and clearly remember walking the halls of the Fortune
500 company, finding it easy to believe that the whole world was
populated by intelligent, hard-driving "doers".

Before I retired, I was a CPA running a business that syndicated real
estate, managed commercial properties, and had a construction company
on the side. I dealt with every day people every day. I love
retirement. I no longer lie awake at night listening to rain and
wondering which roofs are leaking, which insurance company is going to
quadruple my rates and drive me to bankruptcy, which bank is going to
suddenly charge me tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for
paperwork fees because I have to refinance in a year, etc.

The fat lady who slipped and fell on County property next door is not
going to sue me again, nor will my insurance company settle with her
because it is cheaper than fighting it and then more than double my
rates because we had a claim. The SWAT team is not going to visit my
business again (and again, and again). No one is murdering one of my
residents, cutting him up, and leaving the pieces stuffed in an old
chest of drawers beside a running trail in a public park. No one is
moving in on one of my residents at gunpoint, raping her and forcing
her to take drugs, forcing her to work as a prostitute in her own
apartment, stealing all her stuff and pawning it, and dealing drugs out
of her apartment while holding her three year old son hostage.

No one is coming home drunk and passing out on his couch with a lighted
cigarette, setting fire to the whole place, and then suing me because
his smoke detectors did not work after he had removed the batteries to
keep them from going off because he was a heavy smoker. No one is suing
me because he started a fire trying to re-wire his stove. No one is
suing me because I evicted her after her pit bull attacked several
residents and employees. No one is suing me because I evicted their
family after their kids set fire to the stairs and halls with butane
lighters.

I am not called up in the middle of the night by managers who are
telling me that the police are there again or that the fire department
is there again.

I don't have a nut who has put 9 locks on his door and covered the
inside with a metal plate and piled the whole apartment waist deep with
newspapers. I don't have a nut who wants to dig up the neighbors'
apartment to look for her baby. I don't have a nut who 'hides,' stark
naked, behind an invisible pink couch and shoots with an invisible gun
at the kids playing in the pool. Neither will I again have city housing
officials telling me that I can't evict him because that would be
discriminating against a handicap. I don't any longer have escaped
mental patients driving up to my place in a stolen car with a stolen
gun wanting to kill all the 'Russians' in my apartment complex.

The guy who left a burning cigarette on his couch, setting fire to his
whole apartment, and who threw his burning drapes onto his can of
lighter fluid for his hibachi and blew himself off his second story
deck with the explosion will not try to sue me again.

The city is not going to work on the water mains and lower pressure so
much that when they turn the water back on it blows out 127 hot water
heaters that have to be replaced, nor will the residents threaten to
sue me for it again. Neither will it happen again when the apartment
complex down the street catches fire and the fire department sucks all
the water out of the mains, nor will my insurance company again deny
the claim. Neither will residents threaten to sue me because a
horrendous snowstorm took down power all over the city for a week and
all their ice cream melted.

An employee's estranged husband is not going to come into my office and
throw boiling coffee on my employees again. Gangs are not going to set
fire to one of my apartments as an initiation rite again. I will never
again have a gang of heavily armed hoodlums hanging around outside the
office intimidating my employees because we are evicting one of their
drug dealers, nor will one of their goons ever again come up to one of
my employees in a large restaurant and wave a gun in her face again.

I am not going to be sued again by the corporate executive who wanted
an extra large garage door for his RV on his new home, decided he
didn't like it because he was not going to get an RV after all, and
wanted me to re-build the whole garage for free.

I will not have a corrupt building inspector who scuffs the dirt away
from under an electric meter and then tells me that it is a quarter
inch too high again. Neither will a corrupt city official tell me again
that it will take a minimum of three years to get a building permit
unless I pay him $30,000 -- and the city attorney will not back him up
again.

The prostitute who was living in building 4 will not again have her
escaped convict boyfriend come over, drag her screaming down the hall
while waving an automatic rifle, and have a shoot-out with the SWAT
team in an abandoned house a block away.

A group of stewardess roomies are not going to throw a wild party again
which burns down a building. No one is going to leave a pile of
firewood leaning against a free-standing fireplace again. No one is
going to knock a hole in the wall and plug all his possessions into an
outlet in the laundry room again. No one is going to rip up their
carpet and cook all their food on an open campfire built on the bare
concrete pad in the living room again.

No roofing contractor is going to give me a 20 year guarantee and go
out of business in six months again. No one is going to destroy all the
soda pop machines in the place again because they were watching
MacGyver where he pours salt water into a vending machine and they
thought it might actually work. I won't have to spend tens of thousands
of dollars every year cleaning graffiti off the walls. No one is going
to go around bashing all my light fixtures with a baseball bat. No
pedophile is going invite the pre-teenage boys over to his apartment to
watch dirty movies. Gangs will not sodomize kids as part of their
initiation ritual again. No one is again going to threaten to kidnap my
kids or shoot up my home with a machine gun or kill me because I have
the temerity to demand that they pay rent.

The local McDonalds is not going to jam the expensive security radios
carried by our employees again and threaten to sue us, despite the fact
that we were licensed to use the frequency and the McDonalds was not,
nor will corrupt city officials try to over-rule the FCC on the matter
again.

Never again will a fire inspector demand that I spend a fortune on
special cases with glass and locks to enclose the dry standpipes
throughout the complex only to have the next inspector in six months
demand that they be removed, nor will I have an insurance company
demand that I ignore both inspectors and install a different type of
case entirely.

I won't have the illegal alien gang member who is paying off city
housing officials to get the city to pay his rent while he drives
around in a brand-new 7-series BMW any more. Neither will the city
again threaten to sue me because I evicted him. Security guards will no
longer be dealing drugs out of the guard shack, nor will they any
longer be burglarizing my residents.

The apartment complex employee who turned out to be a child molester is
not going to threaten to sue me for discrimination again because I
fired him.

Now, the funny thing is -- and this is just a tiny portion of things
that actually happened to me -- that all this stuff happened in our
more expensive apartments or homes. We also had trailer courts. Some of
them were real slums. And none of them had problems worse than the
'rich' customers. OTOH, how could they have been worse?

People have often pointed out that I seem cantankerous and
unsympathetic. Wanna ask me again how I got that way?

;-)

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

On 2007-10-10 11:50:16 -0700, Nomen Nescio said:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

From: Mxsmanic

That would depend on the job. Today, well-paid jobs usually require skills
that no poorly-paid job will provide--which is why poorly-paid jobs pay
poorly, and well-paid jobs pay well. If one could prepare for a lucrative job
by taking a minimum-wage job, people would be falling over themselves trying
to get the minimum-wage jobs.

So you're holding out for that CEO job?

And as usual, you're wrong again, Dip****.

I couldn't count the number of times my resume moved toward the top of
the pile for ONE reason.
Age 14- picked Tobacco all summer for $1.25/hr.
Looking back, it may have been the best career move I ever made. But, at the
time, I did it for the $40 a week (after taxes).

Tobacco, eh? I picked blueberries. I also swept up the meat counter at
the local grocery store after hours.

People tell me that success is dependent on being in the right place at
the right time. I tend to agree. The problem with 99% of people is that
they have never figured out that they will never be at the right place
at the right time if they never show up to work.



--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

C J Campbell wrote:

{large snip}

People have often pointed out that I seem cantankerous and
unsympathetic. Wanna ask me again how I got that way?

;-)


You just lived in the wrong town. :-)

Matt

People have often pointed out that I seem cantankerous and
unsympathetic. Wanna ask me again how I got that way?

All I can say is that you've made me feel better.

You've also made me extraordinarily thankful that I don't live in
whatever ****-hole city you used to do business in.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On 2007-10-13 10:50:07 -0700, Jay Honeck said:

People have often pointed out that I seem cantankerous and
unsympathetic. Wanna ask me again how I got that way?

All I can say is that you've made me feel better.

You've also made me extraordinarily thankful that I don't live in
whatever ****-hole city you used to do business in.

Anchorage, AK; Bellevue, WA; Bremerton, WA; San Diego, CA; Kent, WA;
Auburn, WA; Redmond, WA; Woodinville, WA; Renton, WA; Port Orchard, WA;
several others. They all have government that make Daley's Chicago look
like a paragon of virtue.

Wanna hear a good one? Last week the University of Washington suddenly
discovered that there were hundreds of convicted sex offenders living
near the University. Imagine that! The university demanded that they
move.

Now, I don't have a lot of sympathy for sex offenders and I don't want
them living near me, either, but when the media report a story like
that I smell a rat. And a rat there was.

You see, a 69 year old woman, Carol Clarke (and she seems a feisty
sort) owned some property north of the University named, appropriately
enough, North of 45th Street. The state Department of Corrections
allows her to house these sex offenders, some of them level 3, in her
units, all under Corrections supervision. She had very strict rules and
in seven years there was never an incident with one of her residents. I
wish I could say the same for the many years I tried to take care of
the so-called 'law-abiding.' sigh

Anyway, her property was valuable and a developer wanted it, but she
would not sell at the ridiculous fire-sale price the developer offered.
The developer went to his old friend, Mark Emmert, who happened to be
the president of the UW and 'informed' him of the North of 45th Street
project (as if Emmert did not know about it already). The regent then
went to our sympathetic governor, Christine Gregoire, who is a good
friend of his, and got her to order all these dangerous sex offenders
moved, leaving the woman who owned the place without a business. Some
sororities were rallied to protest the sex offenders living there for
good measure, of course.

See how it works? I am just cynical enough now to believe that there is
something like that behind practically every news story you see or
read. So now the rest of us have to live with more sex offenders in our
neighborhoods and the good-hearted developer who was so concerned about
those helpless kids at the UW (the same age kids who are considered fit
enough to fight in Iraq, BTW) can sleep better at night knowing what a
good deed he has done. Only he got caught, this time, so he will have
to put up with some small amount of bad press for awhile.

The developer is portraying this as an effort to stabilize the
neighborhood and reduce the high crime rate, even though none of
Clarke's residents have ever been complained about, let alone charged
with a crime. Now, if you want to talk about the gunfire coming from
properties that the developer already owns...

FWIW, the concentration of offenders around UW was already much lower
than it is around all the other 3 and 4 year schools in the city, and
none of them have succeeded in getting the offenders near them moved.

Oh, and when a sex offender moves into your neighborhood, why don't you
call up the governor and see if he orders the offender to move out
because you don't want him there? Good luck with that.

--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

"C J Campbell" wrote:

Before I retired, I was a CPA running a business that syndicated real
estate, managed commercial properties, and had a construction company on the
side. I dealt with every day people every day.

[troubles of Job snipped]

Anyone who thinks Chris is making this stuff up has never been associated with
managing large rental properties.

I'd rather be the night manager at a ghetto 7-11. At least you get a rest
from that job.

--
Dan
T-182T at BFM

C J Campbell writes:

Now, the funny thing is -- and this is just a tiny portion of things
that actually happened to me -- that all this stuff happened in our
more expensive apartments or homes. We also had trailer courts. Some of
them were real slums. And none of them had problems worse than the
'rich' customers. OTOH, how could they have been worse?

What city was this?

On 2007-10-13 12:53:14 -0700, "Dan Luke" said:


"C J Campbell" wrote:

Before I retired, I was a CPA running a business that syndicated real
estate, managed commercial properties, and had a construction company on the
side. I dealt with every day people every day.

[troubles of Job snipped]

Anyone who thinks Chris is making this stuff up has never been associated with
managing large rental properties.

I'd rather be the night manager at a ghetto 7-11. At least you get a rest
from that job.

The funny thing is, I enjoyed the job. There was always something going
on. It was like being mayor, fire chief, police chief, and city manager
for a medium size town. In some respects, it gets addictive. So,
although I keep saying 'never again,' every now and then I see some
apartment complex or trailer court for sale and I think, 'what would it
hurt?'

Well, it would probably kill me. I really did become a flight
instructor for my health. The people I am around are a generally
happier lot.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

I'm not surprised to hear about California (a state my extended family
has entirely vacated, after living there for almost 80 years), but
Washington? I thought that was the new "paradise" all the "good
folks" from California were seeking?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"C J Campbell" wrote:
every now and then I see some apartment complex or trailer court for sale
and I think, 'what would it hurt?'


There are 12-step programs for things like that.


--
Dan
T-182T at BFM