Apartment Manager Adventures

When I was younger we had a balcony where my brother and I would store our bikes and skateboards and toys. One morning my mom heard some noise on the balcony and opened the curtain to find a man using a hack saw on the chains that had our bikes locked up to the balcony! This man was stealing our bikes!!!! My mom chased him off, but I have never forgotten what happened.
Being on site apartment managers of the building, we try to be alert and pay attention to unusual noises. Early one morning, I heard a ruckus on our balcony and those memories came flooding back. I just knew there was going to be someone out there stealing all of our snow removal tools and yard tools!

So I stormed to the balcony fuming mad and ripped back the curtain ready to catch the thief red handed (I intended to give him a good scare by yelling at him) when all the sudden something surprised me and my breath was taken back!….

Click below to see pictures and continue with the story

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Just a quick little story.

With winter creeping in on us here in Alaska, I’m reminded of something that happened last year about this time.

Our units are equipped with a switch inside the apartment that controls a power plug at the apartments corresponding parking space. This allows the tenant to flip a switch to power their vehicles block heater in the winter. Many tenants just flip the switch and leave it on all the time.

One day, my wife and I came home from running some errands, and we saw something that surprised us quite a bit…
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As apartment managers, my wife and I are responsible for everything with the building. We take care of repairs, maintenance, cleaning, collecting rent, etc. If there is a problem we can’t take care of ourselves, then we hire someone else to do it. We live on site, so as you can imagine, we spend quite a bit of time tending to the various demands of the building, tenants, and property.

One thing that I particularly dread is winter snow removal. You may or may not be familiar with winters in Alaska, but we can get some serious amounts of snow here. So much snow, in fact, that the state often has to bring out huge equipment to pick up and haul the snow off the streets.

So with that bit of background, let me tell you about an experience I had one cold winters night…


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