The sh-t hits the fan today. Feb 14 2007 Valentines day. Another day in the life of a landlord. I woke up and was served with a subpeona to appear in court for capturing a guy and a girl that broke into one of my rental property garages last summer. I went over to another apartment building today and discovered something strange. The mechanical room door was open (its normally deadbolted) the light was on and someone had just pissed on the floor. It was still running on the concrete floor towards the drain it was so recent. I have been having problems for the last month at this building. I found hypodermic needles butts etc. in the corridor by the mechanical room on a previous visit. The hair was starting to rise on the back of my neck!! Who the hell was breaking into my building? The neighborhood is going to pot and this is probably the best neighborhood in the city! Other landlords have given up and moved on but not me. Like I said it takes balls to be a landlord in any big city today. I carry a knife with me at all times and its not for scraping tenant overpainting on windows either. My mood on an otherwise perfect Valentines day was substantially starting to sour. I sure wish I could catch the A-holes that were causing me grief.

I looked around and spotted a cigarette butt on the otherwise clean corridor carpet. I checked the other two corridor under stair storage rooms and I could see the deadbolts were secure but damage was evident at the north one. When I was at the north storage I was going to open it when I heard a guy and a girl talking. Sure as shit it was coming from the storage room! My blood began to boil. What do I do next? Should I open the door and risk geting a knife in my gut? My mind began to race. Should I call the Police? My unofficial nic for the cops is Three Hour Charlie because every time I have called them in the past it has taken 3 hours to 6 hours to show up ... or not at all. This time I thought I had better call them and stress the urgency of the break and enter and hopefully get high priority service! The dispatcher said their ETA would be 5 minutes. I hoped like hell they would stay in that storage room. The minutes seemed like hours. About 10 minutes later the cops showed up. The same old guys that I had met many times before. Hey with all the big city crime around here I call the cops usually at least once to twice a month. We went over the situation and then they opened the storage room door.

The cops started yelling come on out...now! Then one cop said "Chris and Amanda, you two again. I thought I told you to quit breaking into apartment buildings!". Chris, a mid 30's scruffy long haired unwashed piece of drug addicted white trash said "Ya ... but it's 30 below out there!"  His sidekick Amanda looked early 20's hard to believe she would be with a degenerate like Chris, her eyes glazed over just stared off into space. The stench that wafted from the two and the storage room was horrible. It almost made me want to vomit. The cop said he was arresting them for mischief. Chris failed to comply when he was asked to put his hands behind his back. A scuffle ensued but eventually the cops got him cuffed. Before searching the cop asked if there were any needles or sharp objects on them or their belongings. Chris said "No". When the cops searched their traveling circus of bags and packs they found hypodermic needles or rigs as the cops referred to them as and a knife! Chris shouted I told you I do dope. What a friggin liar. After examining the broken door the cops also charged them with break and enter. I thanked the cops, maybe now I'll start calling them 10 minute Charlie ... good job. Frigg, now I have to fortify 4 more doorsat a hundred bucks a pop and clean up all the sh-t. I better not see those two turds around any of my buildings again! I'll have to tack the costs of this crap on to good tenants via rent increases! Who said a landlords life was easy!!!