If we run a tight ship in our business lives, for the most part we will avoid major problems. Sometimes things do go wrong, and it will not be our fault. It may be that we have simply come across someone whose standards of behaviour are not as high as ours. That can be quite shocking.
It has happened to me in the past. I undertook a very significant task of getting a new client’s affairs in order when he was in serious trouble with various Government departments. I did a lot of work, and he paid my bills at the beginning. However, he did not pay for the last and quite significant portion of work, and disappeared off the face of the Earth as far as I was concerned. Neither normal search methods nor Google found any trace of him until a year or so later, when Google did find him convicted of a serious non-financial offence.
I thought of this incident and one or two lesser ones when, this week, the tenant of an apartment saw fit to flood his first floor flat by leaving on the shower tap and abandoning the property, not having paid the rent of course. The bill to fix the floors and stairs might run in to thousands, subject to the loss adjuster’s inspection. The damage to someone else’s downstairs apartment is far worse, the ceilings and architraves having come down, and their floors likely a write-off too.
Of course sensible people in the landlord business are insured as we all should be, and it is no use getting upset by such incidents in our business lives. We cannot legislate for bad behaviour, and it isn’t our fault that there are such dreadful people in the world.
We just carry on and put it all down to experience. If we make a mistake we can fix it. If someone else does something dreadful to affect our business lives, we should not take it personally, but accept there are these people out there.
Other people’s bad behaviour is a habit, not directed at us. We have to vet our customers as far as we can, but sometimes a bad apple slips through. Have you had a rotten one?
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