Stories from Rent-to-Own

I was working at a store just off Needmore Road in Dayton, which is quite possibly the shittiest shithole that ever got shat. About 50% of our customer base lived in the PJ's. The store had not once turned a profit in 5 years due to the fact that the residents of the Northland PJ's across the street from us knew the in's and out's of the biz better than we did. Everything eventually was stolen. Nothing we put into someones apartment there ever made it to the full terms of the contract. EVER. But I digress.

We were short a manager so the Regional Manager tosses us some retard from the sticks who thinks he can take this opportunity to make himslef look good by approving everyone who comes into the store. Me and Andy can hardly keep up with the amount of shit he is throwing out the doors when BAM, truck breaks down. Gotta use the Van.

Hooray, triple the time to make a delivery. So we call the customers, explain what's up, and theres gonna be a delay. So we load up this couch and loveseat into a moving van and head over to the PJ's. When I get there I walk up to this guys door and knock, as I do this I look to my right and see a small girl, probably about 6, open the screen door of the apartment next to me, and the screen door promptly falls off it's hinges. I laugh, the little girl looks at me and says, "I didn't do it"

Which just makes me laugh harder. The customer comes to the door at this point and asks me,

Customer - "What are you laughin' at?"
OC - "That." *points to the door hanging on it's side*
Customer - "That don't concern me."
He then lets me in the door and once I get into his living room he goes off.
Customer - "What the hell took you so long to get here!"
OC - *still smiling from the earlier event* "The truck broke, what do you want me to do?"
Customer - "What the fuck does that have to do with me, SMILEY?!"

Now at this point I'm confused. I think I just got insulted, but I'm not sure. Is calling someone "smiley" an insult? Does he think I'm going to let him get away with that when I haven't even delivered his stuff yet?

"AHHH fuck it. Andy let's go."

I walk out of the guys house, close up the van, drive off. When I get back to the store, less than 5 minutes later, the retard manager says the guy's on the phone and pissed. My response?

"Hey just tell him he was denied because he was a dick."

The manager repeats that into the phone VERBATIM, and then hangs up. I proceed to laugh my ass off.

Here's a filthy couch tale.

Myself and my coworker Matt, were working in Hamilton and we had scheduled a pickup for a lady's couch. Now we knew this lady was a little "off" but we were totally unprepared for what happened when we went to pick this couch up.

She lived in an apartment building that had a large, open, foyer-type area, plenty of room to move stuff in, one of my favorite apartment designs. When me and Matt opened that door to the apartment building I immediatly smelled cat piss. I thought a cat must have pissed just inside the front door or something, but no that smell was coming from our customers apartment whcih was ONE FLOOR UP AND THREE APARTMENTS DOWN.

HUZZAH IS IT MY BURFDAY ALREADY?

Walking into this womans apartment was like getting your olfactory nerves curbstomped. By God, the smell was so bad that 40 feet away I had thought a cat had pissed next to me, imagine the smell inside her apartment. The smell was so bad it was almost solid. There was so much cat piss in that apartment I noticed a GODDAMNED HUMIDITY CHANGE. But I digress.

Matt and I brave the various perils of the apartment and get on either side of this massive sofa-bed. We bend down in unison and grab the corners to lift the couch... and as one we look at each other in horror. I had just grabbed a bottom corner of the couch and it was literally SOAKED with cat piss. I FELT IT DRIP. Judging from Matt's expression he had either just received a telepathic message that his son was going over for a sleepover with Michael Jackson, or he had also just grabbed a handful of piss couch.

But duty calls, we lift the couch and take it out of the apartment, straining three times more than normal because we refuse to let the damn thing touch our bodies, toss the thing into the truck and leave. When I got home that day I sat in the shower and cried while scrubbing my skin with a wire bristled brush.

O and that couch? They re-rented it three other times. People kept saying that it smelled like cat piss though, no matter how much it got cleaned.

So here's a tale about a time I was pretty much petrified the whole time I was gonna get my assed kicked.

So myself and Mike were heading over to Mrs. X's home to pickup a bunkbed, when we get there noone answers when we knock, so we leave a door hanger. Knowing this bitch never made a payment on this merchandise, we circle the block to see what happens to that door tag. Bingo, gone. Time to take off the kid gloves and put on my harrassing mitts. So I park down the street and call the whore on my cell phone, SURPRISE SURPRISE someone immediatly picks up.

Mrs. X - "Hallo?"
OC - "HI! *SUPER CHEERFUL* Hey this is OldCharlie over at RentWay and I just stopped by your place to pick up that bunkbed. You must have just got home, I'll swing right over to get that merchandise."
Mrs. X - "Uhhhhh... welll... actually you called me on my Cricket phone, I'm at the store. (Cricket is a local call only cell phone place in Dayton)
OC - "Actually Mrs. X, the number I called has a 937 prefix, Cricket uses a different area code entirely. So I DID call you at home, and I WILL be over shortly.
Mrs. X - "FINE." *click*
So I walk over to the door, HEY NO ANSWER. I am officially fed up with this shit. I call my manager.
Andy - "RentWay."
OC - "HEY, this is OldCharlie. Mrs. X is trying to fuck with us. LIGHT HER FUCKING PHONE UP.
Andy - "Will do."

Andy proceeds to call her unceassingly for the next fifteen minutes, when the phone stops ringing, he calls again. The bitch cracks, tells Andy if he wants the merchandise he was to be at her house in the next 15 minutes. Lucky I was 20 yards down the street, watching the house in case someone came out. SO I roll up to her door in like 3 seconds. We get let in, I immediatly know something ain't right. Mrs. X is nowhere to be seen, and 5 kids are there, around 12-17 years old. So I go upstairs to get the bunkbeds when they start up.

They start making fun of me and insulting me, saying really stupid things like "Does yo Daddy change yo diapers?" and equally stupid shit. This doesn't phase me in the slightest, I look the kid in the eye and laugh. And then the 17 starts in, and this fucker is BIG. Probably 6' tall, all of a sudden he pipes up with a winner.

"I want you to leave now."

Now technically, when that happens I'm supposed to leave immediatly. But they just put me at a disadvantage, so I pull a tactic from the from page one of my poker manual and make my disadvantage seem advantagous.

"No. You can't tell me to leave. Only the property owner can. Have her tell me."

"No, I want you out. GET OUT NOW." He takes a step forward and kinda puffs up, trying to look mean. At this point I've had it, my mind clicks right into FUCK IT mode, I toss all the tools I was holding onto the top bunk and pull out my cellphone. I hold it between my first two fingers and thumb and hold it right up to his face.

"TELL YOU WHAT TIGER, HOW ABOUT I JUST CALL POLICE AND WE'LL HAVE THEM SORT THIS OUT?"

All the kids at this point back up and start waving thier hands around like I was holding up a holy symbol and they were the undead. They scatter like rats and I finish dismantling the buckbeds, while Mike continues to get harrassed as he takes peices to the truck. As I leave with the last peice, they try to get a final dig in, but I just stare down the big kid and that ends that.

Best part? I knew Mrs. X was in the other bedroom upstairs, i could hear her moving around over there. She definatly heard me put her little shitlings in their place.