So we come home from grocery shopping today, and when we come around the corner to our door, Drew looks back at me, panicked, and then pushes the door open. And I realize that the door, which we definitely left locked, was open.
Once we’re both inside we see there’s a guy, dressed in the maintenance garb of our apartment complex, crouched on the floor in front of the dishwasher.
I think we say something like, “Um, what are you doing here?”
He says he has a work order, with our apartment number, to fix the dishwasher. We say we did not place a work order and that the dishwasher works. He says it was draining, so he was confused. We send him out. He leaves. We both take deep breaths. Then I get on the phone with the office to try to find out what the deal is. It’s like 10 minutes to 6:00 on the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m glad they even answered.
The woman who answers the phone is the dumbest one in the office, so Drew and I both roll our eyes and he says things loudly like “Ask if Diana is there, put her on the phone, this girl doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
The dumb girl says things like, “Oh, maybe there was a mistake” and “I’m sorry if there was a mistake” and I say things like “No if there was a mistake” and “We didn’t request this and there was a man [who I’d actually never seen before, although Drew said he’s seen him before] in our apartment.”
About five minutes after we got off the phone, Diana called me back to apologize personally, because she’s the one who wrote down the wrong apartment number. That was nice of her, she didn’t have to do that, and I appreciate that.
Overall, it was fine. He was a maintenance guy, he just wanted to fix a broken dishwasher in the evening of the day before Thanksgiving. Neither of us meant to give him a hard time for doing his job. But it was frightening to come home and find our front door not only unlocked, but cracked open.
And while I don’t mean to come across as a bitch, shooing him out and then being on the phone with the office, clearly upset, when he walked back in there with his bad work order…what if it had been just me coming home alone? I would have freaked out. I only stayed fairly cool about it because I came in behind Drew and so by the time I caught on to what was going on, we already knew it was a maintenance guy.
And he wasn’t in the living room flipping through DVDs…he was crouched on the floor in the kitchen with a wrench. Worst thief ever.
Adrenaline rush!
The Cameraphone Diaries 
One reply on ““I’ve got the TV, the laptops, I’ll just grab the dishwasher and then I’m outtie””
That is scary. In the past whenever I would come home and the door was unlocked I would immediately look for me computer partly because I didn’t want it be stolen, but mostly because if it was still there that meant I could calm down. Only a bad thief would have overlooked it.