Don't Forget to be an A-hole!

"Don't forget to be an asshole today!"

They were the first words I heard the other morning. 

I was sitting on my new deck (that is a whole 'nother story, but the deck is almost done), having my cup of coffee with Bodie.



 

It was about 8:30 in the morning and the neighborhood was quiet.  For a community this size it is a surprisingly quiet place to live.  The silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice from next door.  Lisa.  I love Lisa.  She was "hand picked" to be our neighbor and then to be our coworker as well.  Lisa's Italian.  She's from Chicago.  Soft-spoken she is not.  "Don't forget to be an asshole today!" she yelled back in to her husband as she walked out the front door.  "And if you forget how, just call me and I'll remind you!"

I mentioned that Lisa works with us.  She was hired to handle sales because she has real estate experience and she could sell ice water in Siberia.  Her husband, Joe also works with us from time to time.  His job?  Various duties, including the unenviable duty of Outside Inspections.

Just in case anyone has forgotten, we live in a mobile home community.  No one wants to live in a trailer park. One of the ways we ensure that we continue to live in a mobile home community instead, is by doing outside inspections several times a month.  This means that Joe gets in his little car and drives through all fifteen of the communities the company owns and makes note of things like, "Pile of tires in front yard," or "toilet on lawn" or "huge underwear hanging in front window instead of blinds".  He enters these notes into an app on his phone, which generates a report to me.  I go into the accounts, assess fines and write letters saying such things as, "Please remove large underwear from front window."

Joe is one of the nicest people I know.  I don't think he relishes the thought of being a narc for the company, but who wants to look across the street and see a toilet on the lawn? Or large underwear in the front window? I know I don't want to see it! But I'm sure it's hard for a really nice person to have to report even the most egregious of offenses.  Luckily, Joe has a wife who will remind him....

"Don't forget to be an asshole today!"




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on a Marriage - 7 years in...

Image
Marriage and the Sabbath - two things that God instituted right at Creation.  They are both all about love relationships; with each other and with our Creator.  Curiously enough they are both things that are becoming less and less important to the world. Practically everyone lives together before getting married now. Marty and I did for a year before we even thought about marriage. But that's the past. We lived, we learned, we changed.  And we got married. I was 43 years old and it is my first marriage. He was 46 years old and this is his third time at bat. Do you know how hard it is to get married for the first time after the age of 40? After living on my own for 25 years? Not reporting to anyone or sharing my income and space and possessions? For heaven's sake, I hadn't even thought about marriage since I was in my late teens. In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that when he moved in with me he wasn't even legally divorced from...
Read more

Chapter 3 - Vengeance in the Bathroom

Image
The bathroom is our friend. It's there for us in our deepest time of need. It's there for us when we're at our lowest, at times in our lives when no one else would want to be near us. So why are people so mean to their bathrooms when they're moving out of a home? Why did that poor toilet ever do to them ? The first time the property management office called me and asked if I'd be willing to "once in a while" clean a vacant home for them it was at my husband's suggestion. The place he was remodeling was in desperate need of a cleaning and they didn't have anyone at that time to take care of it. So they called me. I told them I'd be happy to do it. Happy. I actually used the word happy.  I put on some old cut-off sweats and a grubby t-shirt. It was summer. In the south. It was about 90 degrees outside at midday. Have you ever been in a trailer in the summer? You cannot live in these things in the summer without good A/C. They're ovens! ...
Read more

Goals

Image
It's raining today. First rain we've gotten here in what seems like forever. The summer was beyond brutal - record breaking number of days over 90 degrees. It will be October before the week is over and it's finally just down into the 80's, with some 70 degree days in the ten day forecast. The local folks tell me this has not been a normal summer. The winter weather is the real payoff for me here. No blizzards, no negative number temps. Working was a real challenge this summer for both my husband and myself. We earn the lion's share of our income through doing remodeling and cleaning of mobile homes which are vacant and seldom have power or water on, so no A/C and those tin boxes turn into furnaces once the sun comes up. I've been painting for the last few days, doing the interior of a trailer or two but today... it's raining. Not such a great kind of day to paint - it's too dark inside, and too damp. But later we're going to our church to hang som...
Read more