Today’s houses are pretty amazing things. 

In regards to our personal comfort, and the ease at which we achieve that comfort, never in the history of the world has life been better. 

Thank about this.  If two hundred years ago your wife said “I think it is a little cold in here”, you had to get up, leave your log cabin, trek through unknown wilderness, broker a land deal with a group of Indians, cut down a tree, maybe kill a bear, drag the tree back to your house and chop it in to firewood.

In the mean time, your whole family had died due to bubonic plague or something.

All and all not a happy time. 

Now days, you have to get up from your recliner, walk five feet to the wall and slide a little bar on a thermostat half an inch.  And somewhere in the bowels of your house there is a whooshing sound and hot air pours out of vents strategically located throughout your house.  For most people, this is where their involvement stops.  As far as you know or care, that lovely warm air is being produced by families of little elves shoveling pixie dust in to giant bubbling cauldrons.  

That is unless the little elves are on strike and when you slide the bar on the thermostat, hot air doesn’t pour out of the vents.  In that case, you call THE MAN to come fix it.  I don’t know who THE MAN is, or where he lives, but when something is broken everybody always says “I’ll call THE MAN to come fix that”.

Well, it turns out that for Tenants, THE MAN is me.  When a Tenant calls THE MAN my phone rings. Imagine my surprise when I found out that little gem.

So take a second and imagine everything that breaks in your house.  

Don’t only think about the big stuff, like if the house is disappearing in to a sinkhole, but including all the little things that you just live with. 

Think about all those little things.

Are you thinking about that one faucet that drips, the toilet that will sometimes run, the pane of glass that has a crack in it, the door handle that is a little loose, and all the other little minor things that you have wrong with your houses.  Now imagine every time you find something wrong with your house, the free repair man is just one phone call away. 

Regardless of time.

Day or night. 

Do you have the number in your head?  Now multiply that by 12 (the number of houses I own).  Because Tenants expect EVERYTHING in the house to be 100% perfect 100% of the time.

If a Tenant gets home at 3:00 in the morning and his front door hinges creak a little bit, my phone starts ringing. 

I guess in the Tenant’s minds, I just drive around all night waiting for crap to break, so I can rush in like a tool-belt wearing Superman to fix it. 

The truth is I want to spend my time watching TV or sleeping and I don’t look very good in red spandex.

The real irony is I have no idea how the furnace or the water heater or the faucet in the sink works.  I’m just like everybody else, I turn a knob and something happens.  If it doesn’t work, I try it again.  If nothing happens, I am pretty much out of ideas. 

When a Tenant calls me up and says the doorbell isn’t working, my only solution is to say “Have you tried pressing the button?  Oh...you already tried that.  Did you press really hard?  You did that.  Well, I’m stumped.  Ask people to knock on the door instead.  That’ll work.”

Now some people ask “Why don’t you get someone else to fix it?”  And I guess that is a reasonable question.  The simple answer is the rent money can pay the mortgage or pay a repairman. Not both. Repairman or mortgage.  Mortgage or repairman.  Every time mortgage wins.

So the Tenant calls me.  I schlep myself over to the house.  I bang around a lot to give the impression that I know what I am doing; all the while, desperately searching for the giant On/Off switch that has somehow been set to Off.

Surprisingly, I sometimes find the metaphoric On/Off switch and fix the problem.

But most of the time, I can’t figure out why when someone presses the doorbell the garbage disposal comes on. 

Really....I mean really super-seriously really....who the hell knows this stuff?  And why does anyone think I know it?

If I had gone to MIT or, maybe, Bob’s School of Home Repair (MIT’s smaller sister school), maybe then I would know it.  But I didn’t.

So I have to come up with some creative excuse as to why you can’t use a toaster and talk on the phone at the same time.  Something to do with radio waves or electronic interference or something.

So now I loath the sound of my ringing phone.  The sound of BBBBRRRRING BBBBRRRING BBBBRRRRING makes me convulse like one of Pavlov’s dogs. 

I spend my time staring at my phone....willing it not to ring.

BBBBRRRRING BBBBRRRING BBBBRRRRING

Damn....