I work for a vet. We rent clinic space in a small strip mall. We are responsible for interior fixtures, but the physical building, including the dropped ceiling, is the responsibility of the management company that “maintains” the property.

We need some plumbing work done, which necessitates shutting off our unit’s water, and the shutoff valve is in the ceiling. The plumber drops the ceiling tile he moved to access the shutoff valve. Being about thirty years old, it breaks, leaving a hole in the ceiling.

We immediately contact building maintenance and inform them that we need a replacement tile ASAP. No response.

We contact them again a week later. No response.

Another week later, we point out that there is a serious danger of a cat getting up there and being incredibly difficult to retrieve. They finally respond.

Building Maintenance: “Oh, we’ll get maintenance right on that.”

Maintenance never even came by to look at it.

About a month later, the maintenance guy came by, not to replace the ceiling tile, but to ask if we’d heard anything about a new management company because he’d heard a rumor but nothing concrete. I reminded him that we needed a new tile to keep cats from escaping into the ceiling. He said something vague about putting it on his list and left without doing anything.

Today, I got to send three voicemails and an email to the building manager saying that the thing we’d been warning them might happen for a month had happened, and there was a semi-feral cat running around in the ceiling instead of being spayed.

THAT they responded to. They came out in about half an hour to measure and cut a new tile for the space where the broken one had been, and they made plans to replace several other damaged tiles we had asked them to replace last year, as well.

The cat got away from my coworker on the way to being sedated for an exam and had not come out yet by the end of the workday, probably because she was already scared and the noise of an active vet clinic seems even scarier. We set up a trap on the cabinets near the hole overnight, with a bowl of water and some incredibly nasty-smelling warmed sardines as bait. Hopefully, she will be safely contained in the trap when we arrive tomorrow morning and we can proceed with her now heavily discounted spay.

Our forklift has been down for sixty-two days, with several repair bills, many new parts, and no end in sight. This ticket crossed my desk today.

Ticket: “Maintenance Request Ticket:

• Equipment: forklift.
• Problem: forklift.
• Parts request: Ruger American Predator, 50-round bag .223 ammunition.
• Estimated time to fix: 2 minutes until we can finally admit defeat and buy a working forklift.
• Approval: DENIED.”

No end in sight.

I have a job as a gardener/yard maintenance person. I have just finished a job cutting a lawn, edging the driveway and flower bed, weeding, and pruning.

The property owner is very persnickety, and I always explain in detail what has been done.

Property Owner: “Did you pull up all the weeds?”

Me: “Yes, ma’am, at least the ones I could see.”

Property Owner: “Well, what about the ones you can’t see?”

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.

Back in September, we noticed plumbing issues in our apartment. It took video evidence of the taps at full blast with no water coming out, a kidney infection, and six months for them to start looking at it. This is on top of about six years of our heater breaking down every winter. Needless to say, “emergency” is not a word in the maintenance crew’s vocabulary.

It hit a new peak when I noticed that my brand-new carton of ice cream was soup. At first, I thought that maybe the freezer’s door was stuck open just enough to let the cold out over the day, but when it was duct-taped shut for a day and everything began melting, there were no doubts that the freezer was dead. I called the emergency maintenance line and was told that because it was Sunday, nothing could be done about it until sometime Monday and that I should get a cooler full of ice.

H*** no.

All our meat for the week was thawing in the freezer and the fridge was at a nice, cool sixty degrees F. Salmonella likes to say, “Hello!” at forty. I have had food poisoning so bad I had to be hospitalized because I was blacking out while vomiting. I was not going to stand for this. I screamed, cussed out, and did everything short of threatening violence or having the guy fired.

Monday morning came and we were told that we would be getting a new fridge Tuesday, most likely at noon. Great! I mean, it sucked that we had to throw everything we had in terms of food away right when rent was due, but we’d have a freezer and fridge.

Yet Tuesday at four, it still hadn’t been delivered. Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door. The maintenance guy who I had been screaming at, who had let us down time after time, had important news. The fridge was on its way! Yay! He was done at 4:30, though, so he was leaving for the day, but he’d be back Wednesday morning to unbox the new one, set it up, and wheel away the old one.

So, we went from having a fridge with a dead freezer to a dead fridge and freezer to two fridges that we couldn’t use at all, and we had to rely on fast food because maintenance wouldn’t do any emergency work.

Meanwhile, my autoimmune-compromised roommate had E. coli all weekend and I couldn’t use my only toilet.