Boxes Of Entitlement

(We are a company that offers self-storage, apartments, and office space. One of our residential tenants asks about storage for just one night. I explain what we have available but that we only have month-to-month agreements. He does not want to pay for the full month but since he has an apartment right next to our office, we decide to do him a favor and allow him to store about 30 boxes in our conference room for the night at no cost. He promises to have them picked up in the morning. The following morning at 9:00 am, as soon as we open, a man and woman come in.)

Customer: “Hi. I’m here to meet [Tenant] to pick up the boxes he left here yesterday.”

Me: “Great! We’ve put them into the conference room so that they are out of the way. Is he on his way?”

Customer: “Yes, he will be here in just a minute.”

(The man and woman go into the conference room and start moving around the boxes. The tenant comes and goes, but no boxes have been taken out of the conference room. I peek in and see that they have started to unpack the boxes and are looking through all the files on our conference room table. They aren’t hurting anything, so I let them do what they need to do. They even bring food in to eat lunch at the conference room table. After about four hours, they walk out, again with no boxes.)

Customer: “We’ll be back!”

Me: “Okay…? What time do you think you will be done moving the boxes out?”

Customer: “Well, what time do you close?”

Me: “We close at 4:30 pm. You’re planning to be here all day?”

Customer: “We will make sure to be out before you need to leave; we wouldn’t want to take advantage of you letting us leave the boxes here.”

Me: “Uh… okay.”

(They leave for about an hour. When they come back, they are in and out and move about ten boxes to their car. The entire time, I am trying to get through day-to-day activities and helping customers around them.)

Customer: “Okay, we need to close this door. She’s been having people in and out of here all day. We can’t even hear each other.”

(He then closes OUR conference room door to block me out of my own conference room so that they can have a meeting.)

Me: *to one of the owners* “Apparently, I’m disrupting them!”

(They then stay until after 3:00 pm, when I finally have to say something since they still have unpacked boxes in the conference room and are simply in there talking.)

Me: “Are you guys almost all set in here?”

Customer: “Yep, we’ll be out of here by 4:30.”

Me: “Well, our office closes at 4:30, so in order to get everything out by then, you will have to start packing and moving the rest of the boxes out now.”

Tenant: “Yep, we’ll get out of your hair.” *to the couple that have been there all day* “We gotta get out of here, guys!”

(They finish packing up and finally move the rest of the boxes out. Right before I start closing up the office, the tenant is the last one to walk out. He says as he’s walking away

Tenant: “I’ll say it for you, ‘Never again!’ But at least you can say you were part of a CIA investigation.”

Me: “Uh… what?!”