The Continuing Adventures Of Your Own Personal Jesus

This breaks me each time someone walks in. We assess them and send them out there with an amount that we can assist them with. It's really non-negotiable, but that doesn't help with the current rental climate of today . You have to ask, where is the government in all of this, especially when it comes to finding affordable, safe housing? As it is Adelaide has one of the tightest rental markets there is, or does it? It's not that hard to find a place to rent these days. Really, it isn't. If you don't care where you live, or don't care that you might end up with the dodgiesty landlord there is, or have money to burn then you can find a place today. Easy as that. However some people want to live well, don't want to be ripped off by some clown who takes

Sometimes the job can give you nightmares and for very real reasons. As is expected these reasons are often overlooked and ignored until they explode into a physical act, an outburst towards either a colleague or a client or worse. I've seen a few people have minor breakdowns and I've heard of others who were once great workers, top of the tree, who are now mere shades of what they once were. Knowing this I've become aware of my own personal nightmares and the anxiety increasing each time I do counter work. It can be very insidious and more often than not people will take a flex, or call in sick, when there's nothing wrong. In some departments they're called 'mental health days'. I used to laugh at that description, naturally that was born out of ignorance, but now I'll freely admit that I've taken the rare day off using that self-same excuse. Why? Because we're witness to some very disturbing material and very unusual situations. Case in point. ...

No, seriously, that is exactly what was said.

...a pack of lies. Pure and simply put, your mate of a mate told you a pile of crap. It's one of the most common mantras that we hear on a daily basis; "A mate of a mate told me..." or, "I know this guy who knows this person and they did/got/heard about..." I'm here to tell you that none of the myths you've heard are based in truth at all. And doesn't it upset people when you tell them the real story, because what you're doing is calling either them, or their mate of a mate, liars. I don't believe they are liars, but knowing what they're saying isn't the truth means that they're not on the level. First one: "My mate knows this girl and she applied for a house and got one two weeks later." Wrong. Doesn't happen. Has never happened. I'd heard this one too, before I started work. I stay in touch with some people from where I grew up and this one has been around since the early 1980s. This myth has gathered so much m...

...a pack of lies. Pure and simply put, your mate of a mate told you a pile of crap. It's one of the most common mantras that we hear on a daily basis; "A mate of a mate told me..." or, "I know this guy who knows this person and they did/got/heard about..." I'm here to tell you that none of the myths you've heard are based in truth at all. And doesn't it upset people when you tell them the real story, because what you're doing is calling either them, or their mate of a mate, liars. I don't believe they are liars, but knowing what they're saying isn't the truth means that they're not on the level. First one: "My mate knows this girl and she applied for a house and got one two weeks later." Wrong. Doesn't happen. Has never happened. I'd heard this one too, before I started work. I stay in touch with some people from where I grew up and this one has been around since the early 1980s. This myth has gathered...

And then there was the guy who came in and asked if we had a bin handy. My co-worker pointed him to where the little wire bin with the little garbage bag sat on the ground. He wandered over, picked up the bin and promptly vomited into it. After a minute he wiped his mouth, spat and came back and attempted to continue on as if nothing had ever happened. And then there was the guy who walked in and placed his hand on the counter. I recoiled as I noticed something leaping from his skin and onto the counter. I moved back and asked him to please remove his hand from the counter, he looked at me, looked down and said, "Oh yeah, lice. Sorry, forgot." The Windex and Pine-O-Cleen got a good work out that day. And then there was the guy who lived in a house so filthy that when it was inspected one of the people who went out there became sick. So sick in fact that the local quack was stumped, so he sent them to another doctor. That one was stumped as well, the person was getting sicker...

A recent comment jogged a memory about avoiding responsiblity. I got a phone call late last year from a person who was going to be evicted and, understandably, wasn't all that pleased about it. Such is life. From word go she started screaming so I did my three warnings policy: I tell them three times that, if they keep screaming/swearing, then I'll hang up. After the third I usually hang up anyway because I know where it's going. She had gripes and off she went with them. The first was that we gave her no warning that we were going to evict her. Wrong. It takes months to evict and in that time the tenant will get several letters inviting them to come into the office and work out an arrangement to avoid the eviction. They'll also have someone visit them, more than once. She'd ignored all the letters and avoided the people visiting. No contact, tough. But that wasn't her fault, she was busy as we didn't try hard enough. A letter a week for three months? Please...

This one was a doozy. Ages ago, when the weather was a lot warmer (although this week is going to be warm as well - the heat draws them out) I was sitting there on front counter watching a one day international, in short, having a very quiet day. Then the day exploded and shattered into a thousand pieces. The lessons it taught me were that the duress alarms aren't really worth a lot. The day was passing, albeit slowly, but passing all the same when a hurricane thundered through the door. I'm not a small guy but I was dwarfed by this one. He was a good six foot six or seven and about the same across his chest. He wore shorts and shoes and that was about it. Very large and looking very nasty. He stormed to the counter and slammed a card down on the desk and roared, "Who the f*ck gives you the right to tell me what to f*ckin' do??" I looked blank and behind me I heard the sounds of the door not only closing as my co-worker left the scene but also the tell-tale sounds...

Today's wanker is a prize class idiot. The history in the notations says it all. He'd come into his region and abuse/threaten staff and generally run about like the ignorant swine he is. Of course he was rewarded with his own house - all the time he owed us about a grand. Now he owes us about $152,000. How? Easy. He burnt his house down because he was evicted. Here's how it happened. Our guy, let's call him Garry (because the only Garrys I know are wankers), moved into his house and proceeded to start running amok. His favourite passtime is threatening people with knives and other weapons and bashing any woman who comes along. Not sure if he bashes guys, but as he always backs down when a male doesn't back off it's a safe bet that he'd go the king hit from behind only. We started to get complaints about this idiot the day after he moved in and most of the complaints were substantiated. It was hard for him to prove otherwise. For example: we got a compl...

Was the catch cry for the latest rort/scam. We had a tenant phone a few weeks back asking that her house be painted on the inside only, as her kids had smeared excrement all over it. A quick check showed that the house wasn't due to be re-painted until about 2009, so we said, nope, sorry, can't be done. "I'll get it done myself then." she answered. Fine, we said, as long as you don't bill us and you pay for it, we don't care. So off she toddled and rang some couple who specialize in doing affordable house-painting, got them in, got a quote and got the house painted. So far so good? Wrong. You see our tenant posed as a totally different person. The painter asked if she owned the home, she replied yes and to work they went. She doesn't own the home. The painter then sent the bill to her only to have it come right back with a 'Not at this address' stamp on it. The painter is confused, sends another invoice. Same result. You see she gave a false na...

You'd not read it anywhere else but here. Both I Sick and her darling hubby threw, you guessed it, sickies for the day. I wonder where they went shopping. Add to that the fact that when she's faced with work that she might not be able to do she just hides it and hopes no-one will notice. The result of that was an irate customer at the counter today and another on the phone - where are our details? they screamed. Buggered if we know we replied. Eventually we explained the situation and tracked down the missing files and registrations, located under a box on a bottom shelf. I Sick not only refuses to file, she's now refusing to work. There you go. That's two full weeks of work gone since the beginning of the year, plus a handful of half days. As it stands I'm, once again, left to do both my job and hers because she doesn't want to come in and nobody has the guts to pull her up on it. Still I was angry and unhappy enough today to let a few choice comments loose a...

At last count I Sick, I Go Home Now has had a total of 10 days off sick this year already. That's two entire working weeks that she hasn't turned up - add to that the half days that she takes off and you can probably throw an extra four days to that total. Incredible. This is a person who managed to get a long term contract by not speaking English, by hanging up on people because she can't understand them, by being rude to clients, both in person and on the phone, by putting client's lives at risk by refusing to follow guidelines and safety nets that are in place in regards to domestic violence, by being a work-place bully and by simply refusing to do her work. As clerks we're expected to file - that's part of the job description. I Sick has refused to file to the point where, at her region, they have a filing roster to get that simple task done. Otherwise it'd just pile up until it hit the roof. In short she's the worker from Hell, and yet the Governmen...