There are variations of the joke, 3 most spoken lies in the English language. Each of those attempts at humor include; the check is in the mail!
I realize there are: pay pal, venmo, any number of credit card companies, but the real estate man prefers checks for rent payments.
oh, he’ll take cash too.
prefers checks for security reasons, as you don’t want to be seen as a big bearer of cash when rents are paid. especially walking the streets of a big city at the beginning of the month.
Also, the checks leave a paper trail that the real estate man uses for his atavistic method of accounting.
the story of a real estate man:
robert and wilma lived on the third floor of 2435 aspen for almost a year. They were a cantankerous couple. not each other but me. I tried to activate my charm but it had no effect on them.
something they did that affected my disposition was their propensity to pay rent late every month.
finally, i had a variation of stockholm syndrome and i wasn’t expecting it until the end of the month and i was glad i had it at that time.
by the end of robert and wilma’s lease, it was apparent that our relationship had deteriorated to the point that they were going elsewhere.
Shortly after her departure, she still hadn’t received her last month’s rent and hadn’t been given the keys to her apartment.
I changed the lock on the apartment I had to clean to show future tenants. Robery and Wilma had used up their deposit on broken items during the year. no matter how you look at it; I didn’t pay the last month’s rent.
the price of a lawyer would be higher than the judgment won, so any type of legal action would not be profitable.
I confess that I frequently spouted empty threats of legal action for the unpaid balance of rent. I talked about garnished wages and ruined credit.
robert and wilma kept insisting that they mail me last month’s rent along with the keys to their old apartment.
I wasn’t buying it.
sometime around 4 months after robert and wlima moved in; after I clamped down on the missing $2,100 last month, there was a sinister-looking manila envelope with no return address in my PO box.
had several postmarks. it seemed that the postal service had diverted him to all the other places, but not where he was supposed to go.
I’m very suspicious of manila envelopes in general; Ever since Mad Bomber, Ted Kaczynski was up to the pranks of him sending letter bombs.
kaczynski managed to blow off the fingers of several postal workers, injuring many more and killing 3 people during the process of protesting the industrialization of society in the years between 1978 and 1995.
The manila envelope with no return address in my box looked suspicious to me. I didn’t dare to open it.
Who would send me a manila envelope anyway? who would send me something without a return address? what should i do?
I didn’t want to give it back to the postmaster, it might explode when he was handling it.
always who makes the decisions; I decided to flip it with my 1/2 ton chevy truck, rear wheels first.
I took the damn envelope to the back of the post office parking lot where no one parked. I carefully placed it on the gravel-covered pavement and backed my truck up.
I approached slowly and nervously. my intention was to back the truck over the envelope with the hard rubber tires and the empty truck bed absorbing the concussion of the possible explosion. I kept asking myself: how much damage will it damage my truck if, in fact, the envelope contained a letter bomb?
what about damage to me?
was this crazy?
I was questioning my decision every inch.
small bump.
nothing!
back and forth, I moved the chevy in the envelope.
satisfied with the extent of my bomb disposal, I jumped out of the truck to check the manila envelope. it was in tatters.
So were the check and the keys it contained!
register parts with gravel holes and key cuts.
epilogue:
I was able to contact robert and wilma. although they had moved several months earlier, they still kept his cell phone number.
I apologized for doubting them when they insisted they mailed the rent and keys; for threatening litigation and generally making their lives a little more miserable for several months.
Could I have another check in place of the one I wrote, please?
robert insisted and i’m sure wilma agreed that i should:
Fuck you!