the deep moans round with many voices

Most of what I did today at work involved apartment tour videos.

So, tour videos. As part of my job, I stage vacant apartments, take a bunch of photos, and record a narrated video tour (sometimes all on my own, sometimes acting as camera operator for Mr. Geniality). Later I upload the raw footage of each apartment to a photo album in one of our company Google accounts (which I set up and initially paid for but finally remembered to transfer the ownership last year) and I share the albums with our social media guy. I also send him a quick email with notes about extraneous footage to cut and any other unusual elements for each tour.

He then edits the raw footage for each apartment into a finished video, uploads that file to the relevant Google photo album, and shoots me an email to let me know it's ready for review.

I then watch the video and either download it in preparation for posting it on our company YouTube account, OR I let him know that this or that needs to be edited. There were a few edits needed in the videos I reviewed today, mostly basic stuff -- one video had the wrong background music track, one had inaccurate text about air conditioning and heating, one had lost part of the narration when Mr. Social Media was blipping out a creaky door. Little things, but best fixed before we post the video anywhere public.

I also staged, photographed, and videoed a studio whose tenant unilaterally broke their lease two weeks ago, without either giving 30 days' notice OR paying any of their October rent. The furniture had changed since the last staging in 2022, and we like to keep our apartment images as up-to-date as feasible.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be at the Collegetown office, and then Thursday-Friday back downtown. I have been working Monday-Tuesday downtown and Wednesday-Friday in Collegetown to plug the gap between Miss Scatterbrained leaving and New Hire number-I-forget-what being hired, and then also to cover while New Hire is in her training period. This is significantly less than ideal for me, but hopefully this week I can walk New Hire through how to process a signed and paid lease after which perhaps I can pull back to 2 days a week in Collegetown and then back to my normal 1 day per week in December.

We shall see how that shakes out in practice.

Today's minor adventure:

So we have a freight elevator in one of our buildings, right? Mostly our maintenance staff use it to move trash and recycling bins outside without needing to stink up the passenger elevator (and also because you can fit so many more bins per trip), but we also let tenants reserve it for an hour when moving in or out. It's especially helpful for people who bring their own furniture, but also for people who just have a lot of boxes.

Normally we get one of the maintenance staff to operate the freight elevator, but I am also trained to run it in case of schedule conflicts. Which we had this morning. So I spent 9am to 11am helping a tenant move in. There are two reasons the move took that long.

Reason 1: he had hired a couple people to help move his stuff but they had trouble finding the location and showed up 30 minutes late.

Reason 2: this is the adventure part.

This tenant was bringing his own furniture, which mostly wasn't an issue since it was either disassembled or relatively small. However, he had an absolutely MASSIVE sofa. Getting the sofa out of his U-Haul truck into the freight elevator wasn't terrible. Getting it out of the freight elevator and into the hallway, however, was more of an issue. There are two doorways to negotiate, and the sofa, as previously mentioned, was MASSIVE. So the tenant and the movers played applied geometry for a while.

They got through the first doorway, spent five minutes judging angles, then attempted the second doorway.

I leaned in to help squish the cushions.

They s q u e e z e d through by the skin of their teeth...

and slammed the sofa corner into a fire alarm (one of those little emergency pull-boxes), set off the fire alarm for the whole building, and summoned the fire department complete with heavy suits and helmets and a fire axe.

We did call to report that it was a false alarm, but the fire department takes precautions anyway, which is an extremely rational choice under the circumstances.

Anyway, the whole pull-box has to be replaced now. It was absolutely smashed and could not just be put back together.

So that was my small adventure this morning.

(Other mishaps during this particular move-in included me having to shove 5 pieces of our own furniture into random empty apartments because a guy was laying new carpet in one unit and had obviously moved the furniture out... and consequently blocked the hallway. *sigh* And then there was the time the tenant was helping me close the freight elevator doors, lost his balance, and almost got his leg smashed in the jaws of the rapidly closing door. But! We persevered, nobody got more than bruises, and the fire department let all the evacuated tenants back into the building pretty quick.)

I spent a significant portion of my workday clomping around apartment buildings that don't have central air (thus no cooling in the hallways) and often no elevators either. Furthermore, we don't leave the air conditioners on in vacant apartments, so those were also stifling.

I mean, making sure turnovers are done correctly is an important part of my job, as is staging apartments for photos and videos (and for that part, I get to turn the AC on and let it run), but yeesh, I usually finish a round absolutely dripping sweat.

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In other weather-related news, a severe thunderstorm blew through Ithaca around 6:15-7:00pm. Mr. Geniality and I bailed out of the office right as the lights began to flicker intermittently, and were heading out of the parking lot right as the sky cracked open and the deluge poured down.

Then the second line of thunderstorms developed a gap over Ithaca, so I wound up doing laundry tonight after all.

I have noticed over the years that a surprising number of severe weather systems somehow skip over Ithaca. Either they fizzle out entirely, or a front splits in half so part goes north of the city and part goes south of the city, but nothing hits us directly. This is probably related to the layout of surrounding hills, urban heat island effects, and microclimates around Cayuga Lake, but I don't know that I've ever heard an in-depth explanation.

This is not to say we don't get rain or snow! We do certainly get rain and snow. Just that weather severity predictions for the city of Ithaca specifically seem to systematically overclaim compared to what actually hits the ground. And that overclaim does NOT extend to the outlying suburbs -- it's specific to the city proper.

Anyway, I need to go retrieve my dry laundry, after which I may fall directly into bed.

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In news that has nothing whatsoever to do with weather, I bought a six-pack of an apricot-infused hard cider the other day, and my initial test results are promising.

We shall see how I feel upon sampling another can tomorrow. :)

Mr. Geniality was out sick today (apparently he has Covid? oh dear), so my plans for the day got thoroughly derailed since I had to cover his three scheduled apartment showings. I did still get several turnover inspections done, though, and one of the tours should result in a lease, so not a total loss.

I also had three phone calls from fake!FBI tenant, which were of varying length and varying degrees of frustration. The context is ( this gets long )

...

He was doing okay-ish for about a month after his extensive hospital stay, but he has clearly stopped taking whatever medications he was prescribed and has slid back into delusions and/or mania. He is not well, he needs help, and our company is 100% not equipped to provide it.

Today's highlight: found a silly Colin Firth joke on Tumblr, took a screenshot, sent it to my family. :)

(Context: Pride & Prejudice is my mom's favorite book. When the 1995 miniseries came out, she bought the deluxe VHS box set and watched it so frequently that I have multiple scenes engraved onto my brain and I think Nike might be able to quote the entire script line by line. She also began tracking down every single film Colin Firth had been in up to that point and watched any new ones in theaters. (I have seen some deeply weird arthouse films as a direct result of this.) I don't know if her celebrity crush is still burning very strongly these days, but it lasted a good 15 years and Nike and I will never stop lovingly teasing her about it.)