I don’t trust my property manager. That’s not the same as not liking them; I just don’t trust them. So I refuse to mail my rent check to them. I refuse to pay them online. I insist on walking my happy butt the whole two blocks down the road to hand-deliver my checks directly to the office, and then I wait patiently while I insist that the nice ladies there write me a receipt.

I do this because I know people in the building who have been sent late notices with additional late fees because the management office managed to lose the rent check.

Case in point: March 2014.

Sometime around April 2014, the hairstylist across the hall and I both noticed that our March rent checks had not yet cleared our banks. We both giggled and agreed that neither of us felt the need to call the manager and mention it to them.

Secretly, we may have hoped that they’d just misplace them permanently.

The thing was, no one was calling and telling us we were late. We figured they must have entered the checks into the books and then managed to lose the actual checks before they made it into the bank.

It was June when I got a very polite call from the management company to let me know they had found my check and wanted to give me a heads up that they would be depositing it.

(defeated sigh) OK. Fair enough.

So my rent check for March 2014 cleared my account on June 12, 2014.

Wanna know how I know the exact date?

Because today I got a text message from my management company saying my rent was late!

So I went to my files, grabbed my receipt from just a few weeks ago, and proceeded to call up the offices to tell them they smoke crack.

I was informed that since I missed my payment last March I’ve been a month behind ever since.

So I looked it all up in my check register and informed the office that I did not miss my March payment last year. That that happened to be the month that they lost my check. I gave them the check number, the date it was written, and the date it cleared my bank. And I have the receipt from then too.

Good grief. I have to get a print-out of the cleared check from my bank and take it to them. Because whoever was keeping their books (I was informed that that person is no longer with the company) apparently wrote my check in and then “reversed” it in the ledger!

Seriously? They have it in their records that I’ve been a month behind for an entire year now and didn’t bother mentioning it to me?

Good grief. Make sure you get a receipt.