the deep moans round with many voices

Work started out well, but then devolved into a puddle of ARGH in the late afternoon.

In summary, when I inspected an apartment around noon and marked the turnover as complete, I failed to raise all the blinds. When I came back some hours later to stage the apartment in prep for photos and videos, which should have been nice and simple, I did raise the blinds...

...and discovered that the outgoing tenant had plastered the entire bottom right quarter of a giant picture window with some kind of heat reflective product. It was sort of like... hmm... like someone had taken a giant reflective mylar sheet, cut it into 8x10 inch blocks, and coated one side with a quarter-inch thick layer of pitch or asphalt. And then slapped the pitch/asphalt sides against the window until they made a sort of pitch/mylar quilt. The slabs felt kind of like bricks as I peeled them off, they smelled godawful, and they left the most hideous residue all over the glass. Plus there were random double-sided tape strips underneath the goo (and all over the bottom left quarter of the window), as well as some generic puffy adhesive strips for good measure.

Who the fuck DOES THAT???

And how did the cleaners MISS IT???

(Also, did Ms. Random Numbers bill them for that? I need to double-check with her tomorrow.)

So yeah, trying to scrape that off and wipe it clear ate the remainder of my day. I finally gave up around 6:15pm and bought a container of Zippo lighter fluid on my way back to the office to sign out, because lighter fluid can work miracles getting tape residue off of glass -- hopefully it will work for this gunk as well.

I am going in early tomorrow morning because I have three apartments I need to slam through before noon and I need every spare minute I can grab. UGH.

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In completely unrelated news, I beta'ed someone's NFE fic tonight and I think y'all are going to love it. :)

I've been putting together my rather belated end-of-year writing roundup post, and realized I forgot to crosspost this snippet over here. So! Here is the opening of a story about two women and some haunted paintings, written December 11, 2020, in response to a getyourwordsout challenge post. [515 words]

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untitled haunted painting story
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"What's with the creepy painting?" Gwen asked as she took her coat off just inside Isabel's front door. "I know we haven't talked art much, but I never figured you for an abstract horror person."

"It came with the apartment," Isabel said. "It's actually written into my lease -- no furnishings, but one painting in each room. They've all got little motion sensors and if I take them down I lose my damage deposit."

Gwen raised her eyebrows. "Really. And you agreed to that?"

Isabel told her the rental rate.

Gwen whistled. "Yeah, I'd put up with some creepy paintings for that kind of deal. But seriously, you can't move them at all? Like, not even turn them around so they're not, like, staring creepily at you every second? That one would put me off dinner on bad days, and if you've got another like it in your bedroom, how do you sleep?"

Isabel shrugged. "I pinned a wall hanging in front of the bedroom one -- honestly, sometimes I even forget it's there. And you can get used to all kinds of crazy things after a while. I heard they did an experiment in Russia once, parked a tank next to an office building, and it only took about a week for everyone to stop noticing it."

Gwen examined the painting again. It was very clearly not a picture of anything specific, and yet the shapeless colors somehow stared down at her with a knowing, hungry leer. "I don't think two hours between now and dinner is enough for me to ignore that. A tank would probably be easier."

"Fair enough. I'll chuck a towel over it or something; it'll be fine." Isabel suited action to words, and soon the wall held nothing more unnerving than a mint green hand towel with slightly frayed decorative stitching at the bottom edge.

Gwen eyed it mistrustfully nonetheless. "I still can't get past how weird that is. What kind of weird control freak sticks creepy art in every room and writes into the lease that you can't take it down, or even move it to a different wall?"

"Beats me, but Mrs. Bligh was very insistent," Isabel said as she returned to the kitchen side of the room and started pulling pots and pans out of a cupboard. "She said something about the house's first owner being an artist, blah blah terms of the will, blah blah historic value. And she looked so worried when I asked about moving them that I figured, whatever, it's just some ugly art. I can humor a sweet old lady."

"I still think it's creepy," Gwen said, but she let the subject drop and by the end of the evening had nearly forgotten about the paintings altogether. They were nothing more than the whim of an old woman with an idiosyncratic fixation on history and art provenance: weird and ugly, but harmless.

When she woke in the middle of the night with the bone-deep conviction that something malevolent was watching her from Isabel's bedroom wall, that rationalization melted down her spine like ice.

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To be continued...?

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Random trivia: When I was apartment hunting back in 2005, one place I toured was a ground floor unit in a subdivided house. It was in good shape and had a recently renovated back deck... but it came fully furnished, complete with somewhat questionable wall art, and the landlord insisted that all items remain exactly as they were set up. Tenants weren't even allowed to change their thermostats, which were locked inside tiny wire cages. The landlord himself lived in another state entirely -- Virginia or Florida or something -- so if you were hypothetically too hot or cold, you had to walk across the street to the house of one of his old friends, hope like hell she was home, and ask her to come unlock the thermostat and adjust the temperature -- and she couldn't even do that without calling the landlord and getting his permission! *headdesk*

So yeah, there are some people out there with serious control issues.

Also, needless to say, I did not rent that apartment.

Today I once again attempted to be both myself and Mr. Geniality at work, with... mostly decent results? I missed a few phone calls while I was on my lunch break (look, I am sorry, but I am not going to answer the phone with my mouth full of pizza and my hands covered in grease) but I will catch up on any messages tomorrow and at least one of the people in question called back later anyway, so.

I made progress on two leases, which is good, and did some metaphorical handholding for two incoming tenants who were having separate and unrelated payment method woes. In the Collegetown office, our actual policy is to transfer any calls of that nature to Aunt Boss if she's in; she listens, and is sympathetic, and explains options, and puts her foot down when necessary. At the downtown office, absorbing that kind of stress is suddenly part of my job description again, though when Mr. Geniality is here I tend to fob people off on him because he's better at sounding emotionally invested and also is in the same physical office space as Ms. Random Numbers, Ms. Rise-and-Shine, and Lawyer Man so it's easier for him to chuck a problem at them if it needs to be escalated to a manager, as it were.

Anyway, I think I worked out functional plans for both distressed tenants, and I made a lot of sympathetic noises because yeah, it is stressful not knowing what the post office has done with your check, or being unable to make an electronic payment from [country redacted] one day before an international flight and a long bus trip.

I have been emailing people about W9 and W8 forms (required to open the escrow accounts where we hold tenants' security deposits for the duration of their leases) and various changes/updates required by various banks. So far I've gotten a few new forms, a couple people saying "Hey, this doesn't apply to me because [reason]," one email that bounced because the recipient's inbox is full (WTF???), and a whole lot of resounding silence. *sigh*

I've also been creating a spreadsheet that we will eventually use to generate renewal notice emails, which has been taking a lot longer than necessary since A) downtown doesn't use FileMaker so I've had to combine two separate Rent Manager report exports to get as much of information as possible onto a single spreadsheet, B) a bunch of the other information isn't automatically exportable at all (gee thanks, Rent Manager *grumble grumble*) so I've had to enter it manually, and C) the downtown office straight up doesn't collect some of the information Moss Boss wants in the first place. *headdesk* This spreadsheet will have so many holes in it, I swear.

And today Ms. Rise-and-Shine asked me to start creating various procedure write-ups for the downtown office. On the one hand, this is good! This is the sort of thing I was transferred to do! On the other hand... what time am I supposed to do that in??? *flops*

...

Right. I'm going to bed now.

Mr. Geniality returns on Monday. I am looking forward to shifting a bunch of the workload back onto his shoulders.

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In unrelated news, I got a weird string of spam comments last night and this morning. I've deleted them, reported them, and blocked the accounts that posted them, but I have no idea what was going on.

They were more clever than normal spam comments, in that most of them had a sentence or two that actually related to the post content before they started talking about random apps or website and embedding fishy links, but that could probably be done with an AI text generator these days so I don't know that it means much. Even so, while the string of comments made the pattern very clear, the first one gave me pause because the first two sentences really did sound like a legit comment on a story; it wasn't until sentence three that it got overtly spammy.

Has anyone else experienced something like that in recent days?

So, back in April 2017 I got a performative outrage troll who left nasty comments on nine out of ten chapters of "Tides". In February 2018 the same anon left a nasty comment on "Rituals".

Today the anon returned and, either having forgotten that they'd previously commented on Rituals or frustrated at my lack of reaction, left another nasty comment on ff.net.

To wit: ( the comment in question )

...

I mean, on the one hand these are hilarious and always make me smile at their pointless, futile rage, but on the other hand I'm starting to get genuinely worried for this anon. They have been doing this kind of close hate-reading for over two years and haven't grown out of their poisonous views at all. That has to be emotionally exhausting. They are obviously not okay.

I wish they'd leave contact info so I could tell them to please stop reading stuff they hate because that's not healthy and I want them to feel good instead of shaking with outrage.

An actual email I received today from my church mailing list:

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[announce] Spam emails from Margaret fake gmail - Important

Hello wonderful congregants!

I wanted to let everyone know that someone is using a fake email address for Reverend Margaret attempting to get people to send them money or gift cards. These are not real. Please do not purchase any gift cards, disclose any bank information or send any money. Margaret is fine, and we wouldn't want anyone taken advantage of.

Warmly,
J.E.

Congregational Administrator

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...

...

I just. Who does that?