i'm an official slumlord now...

i've started a training program with my company and the first thing they threw at me was unit inspections. we have an audit coming up and the state wants to make sure we are building and maintaining high standards for our apartment homes. we want to make sure that if there are any problems, they are discovered and hopefully fixed prior to the audit. and that means, inspecting all the units.

my supervisor tried to scare me out of going on the inspections. "remember to wear closed toed shoes, there might be bugs" she said...but there were only two apartments, out of the eighty inspected, that had bug issues. and in one of those, i only saw the one roach, which i more or less killed in the stove top burner (i was testing to make sure the burner worked, and i guess he was being called into the light because he just hopped right into the flame).

our inspection team divided the different areas of the apartment and i got the kitchen. i checked the microwave light and vent, all four burners, the stove light, the kitchen light, garbage disposal, made sure both sink nobs worked and actual water came out, checked under the sink for leaks, and located the fire extinguisher. not a very large percentage of tenants clean their kitchen to the level i do, but i expected that. and really, i think i came out of the experience mostly unscathed. everyone sort of built it up to the point it seemed we were visiting somalia rather than apartment complexes, but at the end of the day, i don't need a tetanus shot and there was only one kitchen that i just couldn't bring myself to touch. given the number of kitchens i'd already touched, honestly at that point the level of germs already on my fingers was nearing CDC quarantine levels, you really have to think outside the box to imagine how awful this particular kitchen was.

the worst part was the smoke alarms. whoever was in charge of that inevitably managed to check the first one at about the time i finally got the third burner, on the gas stoves, to light. so every single time i just knew the whole building was bursting into flames. and also, after inspecting roughly eighty apartments, with three to four smoke alarms in each, my head really hurts.