Yesterday, my landlord left a note saying, basically, “sorry for the short notice, we’re replacing the roof tomorrow and Saturday, we’ve had this delayed because of rain a few times and we’re very sorry for the disruption.” One thing it didn’t mention: that we should probably move our cars.
I live in a rental townhouse that’s one of 6 units in the building. Our street is a mix of these rental townhouses, and fancier condo ones from the same builder. We have a 1 car garage in the basement, a shared driveway for the whole building, and several parking spaces in the driveway. My wife’s car was parked in one of those spaces, opposite our garage. You can just see it behind the pallet of shingles on the giant crane truck that parked in the middle of our driveway.
Overall, this wasn’t a huge problem to deal with. I went outside to the driveway, and asked a guy who appeared to be in charge if it would be possible to move the crane truck so we could move our cars. I apologized for inconveniencing him and said it wasn’t his fault, because the landlord had only told us about this work yesterday, and didn’t say anything about we would need to move our cars. He rolled his eyes at that part like, “geez why wouldn’t the landlord tell people to move their cars so we could have the place ready to work on?” Then he said he’d finish loading one last pallet of shingles up to the roof and then move the truck. All good.
But I couldn’t help but be a little irked by all this. The property manager lady from the landlord company went to the trouble of typing up a nicely formatted note that even apologized for the late notice, and had the maintenance guys deliver it to each unit. If you’re already doing all that, why not, oh, I dunno, maybe mention that there’s going to be a bigass truck in the driveway and tenants should put their cars on the street?
So on my way to work, I left a very nice, “we’re not mad, but...maybe if you’re having other buildings’ roofs replaced you should mention to people they should move their cars” voicemail for the property manager. I think I said “don’t worry we’re not mad” like 5 different ways during this message. Hopefully I struck the right tone.
Anyway, happy Friday! Someone at work brought in donuts this morning, same as every Friday morning, and I’ve given up on trying to resist eating the donuts, because inevitably if I start a Friday morning with my usual protein bar and piece of fruit, I still end up with a donut later in the morning.