Workplace Nightmares·
THE DUTY DILEMMA
In a tiny three-unit building, the only resident who can help faces a mysterious property-manager request, sparking questions about pay, history, and who should shoulder the task.
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The message came from the property manager, and it asked the only person in the building who could do the job.
In a three-unit place with one apartment sitting vacant below and an elderly gentleman upstairs, the poster says they were suddenly looking at a request that seemed to land squarely on their shoulders. They shared the message with a simple opening line, "Got this message from my property manager", and then laid out the setup: "For context I live in a 3 unit with one vacant apartment below me and an elderly gentleman in the unit above me(so right now I'm the only one who could do it)."
That detail is the whole tension. If the downstairs unit is empty and the only other tenant is an elderly neighbor upstairs, who exactly is supposed to handle the task? The poster says, at least for now, there was only one possible person to ask: them.
So they turned to other people for comparison. "Has anyone ever gotten a request like this and what was the pay?" they asked, wanting to know whether this kind of arrangement was normal and what it paid. The question suggests the request wasn't framed as a casual favor, but as something with potential workload attached, the kind of thing that raises immediate eyebrows when it arrives from a property manager.
There's also a piece of history tucked into the post. The poster says the person who used to live in the vacant apartment had been doing these tasks before moving out. "The man who previously lived in the vacant apartment was doing these tasks and I don't know how much he was payed," they wrote.
That leaves the poster in an awkward spot: the building's former helper is gone, the downstairs unit is empty, the elderly tenant upstairs apparently isn't the answer, and the message has landed on the one person left who can step in. The post stops there, with the poster still trying to figure out whether this is a standard request, who should be paid for it, and how much the last tenant was getting to do the same work.