Cabin Fever Sets In!

It's been a wild winter already. We have exceeded our number of snowfall plows and everyone is paying for each snowfall that happens until the end of the season. It has been -18 degrees one day and +25 degrees the next. Everyone is tired of the winter and they are all crabby.

My week last week was supposed to be nice and quiet and allow me to get caught up on all the little organizational things that need to be done. Not only did I not get that done, I was struggling to keep up with all the every day things. You know it's going to be a bad day when you come in and you have 14 voice mail messages waiting for you. In this business, a voice mail generates a phone call back, a work order to create, or three other calls to track something down. Therefore, 14 voice mails is most of my morning. That was every day last week, give or take a voice mail or two. In comparison, the week before was 2 or three voice mails a day when I came in.

Most of the problems are stemming from the weather. They have an ice dam, they have no ice melt, there was a water pipe burst in a neighbor's unit, or they don't like the job the snow plows are doing. All very reasonable issues, it's just a lot when it happens all at once.

Of course, we have a lot of foreclosures in the different associations, so I sent out two different contractors and several board members to check on them to see if they are occupied or otherwise taken care of. If not, they had to be broken into and winterized. I'm sure this saved us some headaches in the long run. In the here and now, we still had a bunch of other pipes freeze. People living in their units but they had poorly insulated pipes and things froze. On top of this, the mechanical room of one of our mid rise buildings is not heated, and therefore a booster pump froze and broke leaving 35 units without water for a day.

So, everyone in the office is going crazy just trying to stay afloat. This can be good, because no one has time to pick on anyone else, but it can also be bad, because by the end of the week, we were all grumpy.

Now, if we are crabby, you know the homeowners are going to be, too. No one has any patience any more. They all want something and they all want it now. On top of that, they have nothing better to do since they are trapped inside, so they start finding things to pick on with their neighbors. Suddenly, homeowners are fed up with the same noises their neighbors have been making for months. They call to complain about something to do with landscaping because they just thought about it and want it on record. Then, in the course of our jobs, we have all sent out "nasty grams" to people reminding them of some paperwork they have forgotten to submit or to tell them they are in violation of a rule. This, as a general rule, generates phone calls from a few people. In the midst of cabin fever, it generates more, and they are all crabby. Additionally, the brains of some of our board members have frozen along with the snow, and they are asking some of the most ridiculous questions.

When you take a step back and realize that it is just cabin fever, it is somewhat comical. When I am in the middle of it, it just makes me want to pull my hair out.

OK, that's enough about life in property management. There's nothing amusing about this one, just rambling about this crazy business we are in.