Work-Related Ranting

[muck_a_luck]

Landlord representative contacts us for payment of a bill that is over due. She prefaces her query by letting me know she is new.

I tell her the billing was in error and has been disputed.

The person who disputed the billing is an accounting firm that is part of our group. And the lawyers in the group have agreed that the billed servicse should be free under our lease.

I suggested the person might want to just review our lease and be sure that the charges were correctly billed before wasting more of her time trying to collect from us.

New person got back to me, saying she had reviewed the lease and found a paragraph in the lease saying that the landlord was permitted to bill us for overtime services.

At which point I sighed and huffed and went and got a copy of the lease, and took it downstairs to the woman and pointed out to her that yes, of course they could bill for overtime, but they could NOT bill for the hours that accountant said we were being billed for. I held the lease in front of her and helped her connect the dots from the paragraph on servicse included in our rent, to the paragraph on the hours the services were included. She went back to her we-can-bill-for-overtime paragraph, which clearly pointed back to the paragraphs about included hours.

I said, "I'm sorry, but I don't have the bills, so I don't know what hours were billed for, but accountant says they were hours included in the lease. Have you reviewed our billing to find out what hours we were billed for?"

Oh, no, she had not. She just had a number popping up saying that we owed some money.

So sad.

I suggested she check the disputed billing and see if it had been correctly billed.

Which was what I suggested to her originally.

I swear to God, it is people like this woman who generate 30% of lawyers' work. No ability to read. No comprehension. No ability to make elementary logical connections between facts. It is just sad. Sad, sad, sad. This woman is supposed to be a real estate specialist, she should be able to read and comprehend a basic lease. She is managing this building. She should be able to resolve a billing dispute. So. Sad.

Comments

[zats_clear]

My friends were renting a house in Colorado that was being handled by a property management firm. To say their billing was creative would be an understatement and I am sure they end up with quite a bit of money from exhausted tenants who just give in and pay. Mary is not one of those tenants, however, and kept meticulous notes and copies of letters and emails. These morons went so far as to post an eviction notice on their door because they have failed to cash the check she could clearly show was in their possession.

The stupid...it burns