My friend lives in an apartment building on the fourth floor. She has problems with her knees which are aggravated by a number of factors. Recently, she texted our friend group.

Friend: “My apartment building’s elevator has been out of service for FOUR WEEKS, and they say it will be another two weeks at least before it’s fixed!”

Apparently, the elevator hadn’t been inspected for years, and they shut it down for safety reasons to bring it up to code. What’s really scary is all the times we rode in that elevator. You can be sure the next time I ride in one, I’m going to check the last time it was inspected.

This is a nice complex, not the kind where you would expect this kind of thing to happen. The apartment complex did eventually fix the elevator, and they gave the building’s residents money off their rent as compensation, but it makes you wonder if it’s the only building with this problem.

This happened shortly after I moved into a new apartment building three years ago. The landlady and owner of the building lived right next to my apartment on the first floor. She was a very nice old lady, and we would often sit out on our shared little patio and talk from time to time. She even told me I reminded her of her granddaughter one day.

After I’d lived there for about six months, she approached me one night while I was sitting outside.

Landlady: “So, who is that man that I’ve been seeing come over?” 

Me: “Oh, that’s my friend, [Friend]. We have been friends for a while now.”

Landlady: “Ohhh… When are you going to go steady?”

Being a young person, I assumed she meant dating.

Me: “Oh, we aren’t dating. He’s just my friend.”

After making some food for the two of us and coming back out, she said to me:

Landlady: “You know, you are a very social person. You always have so many girlfriends over. I see all these different girls come over. You must be very popular.”

I was hesitant about telling her this information because I wasn’t sure how she would react. I tried to word everything in the best way possible, but I was freaking out inside. Not only was she my landlord, in charge of whether or not I lived there, but I had grown quite close to her in those past six months and I didn’t want to feel judged. Old ladies tended to have old-fashioned viewpoints. But I took a breath and said:

Me: “Um… Actually, I am interested in women and those women were my partners.”

Despite my held breath, she only looked shocked for a brief second before replying. 

Landlady: “Oh, well, that’s okay, honey. I used to sleep around a lot, too, when I was your age. You will find a nice lady to settle down with someday.”

I was completely worried about the wrong thing. She moved right past the fact that I’m a lesbian to the fact that I had been sleeping around. She proved to me that older people aren’t always stuck in their ways, and I see the older generation differently now.

I live in a condominium that has a pool and playground downstairs. It’s pretty communal. All the kids know one another, partially because well over half of them go to the same primary school down the road.

We also have a bunch of security guards — rent-a-cops essentially. I’m not exactly sure why the HOA keeps them around given Singapore’s nonexistent crime rate. Still, they enforce the rules in our condo.

For better or for worse, my family is very familiar and friendly with the guards. This is half because we’ve been living there for fifteen years and counting, and half because my younger brother is the biggest troublemaker on the block. He got skateboarding banned after he nearly ran over a three-year-old, and was responsible for — or at least involved in — a considerable amount of the mischief and bad behaviour the local boys got up to.

As such, it’s not the first time that the security guards have come knocking.

Me: “Hi, [Guard]. What’s the problem?”

Guard: “I’ve got complaints from two mothers downstairs about your brother flashing a butterfly knife and threatening their kids with it.”

Me: *Long sigh* “Seriously?”

Guard: “We take a very serious stance about weapons on the premises. I’m afraid that we might have to get the police involved. Knives like that should be illegal in Singapore, I believe.”

Me: “It’s a toy. He watched some movie or another and got really obsessed with getting a butterfly knife toy of his own. I don’t know why our parents agreed to get him one.”

Guard: “A toy? Can I see it?”

I dig it up and pass it to him.

Guard: *Examining it* “The things they make these days.” *Passes it back* “The blade is metal and rather sharp. I’m afraid, toy or not, I’m going to have to ban it from downstairs.”

Me: “No problem. I’ll relay this to my parents. Sorry again for the trouble.”

As promised, I tell my parents.

Dad: *In a confrontational tone* “Who are those parents? They obviously are overreacting. It’s a toy.”

Me: “Toy or no, it looks real, and that scares people.”

Dad: *Dismissively* “People are all so scared these days. It’s not a big deal.”

I could tell by his tone that he’d tuned me out and I wouldn’t be winning that argument. Instead, I got Mom to get a certain wonderfully weird idea into Dad’s thick skull; maybe, just maybe, mothers don’t like having sharp metal objects pointed at their very young children.

He conceded and agreed to drop the issue, but I still heard him grumbling about “wimpy parents being overprotective” and “teaching their kids to be sissies” quite frequently.

Almost fifteen years ago, I lived in an apartment that could have been better managed by a pair of monkeys. Any type of maintenance request would take weeks and would have to be redone multiple times as it was either done incorrectly or they would state it was done but never came by to fix it in the first place.

I lived on the second (top) floor and started to hear some strange sounds in the crawl space in what would be an attic if there was one. I took a look in the maintenance hatch and came face to face with a duck!

There was a duck in my ceiling!

I contacted maintenance to let them know.

Me: “There must be a hole somewhere. A duck has taken up residence and is making a bunch of noise. Can you please fix the hole and remove the duck?”

They didn’t believe me. I sent over photos of the duck — and now a whole nest and a second duck. They finally opened a ticket.

I came home from work and it seemed that they had come over while I was gone. They had taken one of my boxes of personal belongings from the closet, dumped everything out on the bed, and left a note that they had taken the duck out from the “attic”.

I took a look in the hatch and there were two very angry ducks.

I called maintenance, a bit upset at this point.

Maintenance: “We removed the duck.”

Me: “Did you patch up whatever hole they’re coming in from? No? Because they’re back. Why did you use one of my personal boxes to remove a duck if you were not going to remove the way they were getting in?”

During this whole time of living with the ducks in my ceiling, I kind of got used to the noise, but when I would have friends over they would notice it. I would just say that they were my new neighbors upstairs and that I had called the front office multiple times about the noise.

My smarter friends would quickly figure out that I was on the top floor — so how did I have upstairs neighbors? My other friends, well… it was fun to clue them in on it later.

Maintenance never patched the hole.

A while later, I had itty-bitty little ducklings jumping off the roof onto the ground giving me a minor heart attack. All of them made it down safe, but it was a scary two or three hours or so while Mom and Dad tried to get them to come down, and I was disappointed in my fire department as they didn’t want to come out and help.

I moved out to another apartment in the same place to finish out my contract, with no moving fees due to the duck issue.

I was at the mailbox one day, and I saw a lady getting her mail from my old apartment.

Me: “How’s the duck issue going?”

She about blew up complaining about the noise and how maintenance used her good comforter to try to wrangle the ducks.

I don’t miss that place.

I lived in an apartment building. One time, someone on the floor above me got a package delivered. I know this because when the delivery driver couldn’t get a signature from them because they weren’t home, he began to knock on my windows because he could see me inside. I closed the curtains because it was creepy. He yelled from outside:

Driver: “I want you to sign for this package for your neighbor!”

Me: “No. I don’t know them, and if the package gets stolen after I sign for it, I’ll be blamed.”

He knocked on my windows for the next fifteen minutes, telling me I had to sign for their package. He only left when I told him I was calling the police.

Fast forward about three months. I was waiting for a package and it was, you guessed it, that same delivery company and I would assume that same driver. I started getting tags saying that they had attempted delivery, but no one ever knocked or rang my buzzer.

This particular company would only leave three tags before returning the package to the seller, so I called them to ask why I had received two tags but no one had ever knocked or rung the doorbell.

Employee #1: “We’ll have it redelivered on [date].”

I made sure to stay home that day. Nothing arrived, not even a tag. I called the company.

Employee #2: “A third attempt was made to deliver your package, and it was returned to the seller.”

I went up the chain until I got someone to reverse that decision and send a driver literally right now. FINALLY, the driver showed up, and it was the one who’d harassed me about the neighbors’ package months prior. I answered the door.

Driver: *Snarkily* “See? Bet you wish someone else would’ve signed for this, huh? I knew you don’t sign for other people’s packages, so I didn’t ask anyone else to sign for yours.”

I reported him to the company. I never saw him again. What a weird grudge to hold. It’s not abnormal or bad to refuse to sign for another person’s package when it’s going to get left in a public lobby for anyone to grab.