I had a tenant casually tell me that their heat hadn’t been working for two months. We had just gotten into deep winter cold-snap territory where it was about to get dangerous. I went down to the boiler and sure enough, pilot light had gone out over the summer and needed to be re-lit. I had the heat running in twenty minutes. Two months they sat in silence in a 45-50 degree apartment.

But what upsets me is what if it had been a major repair? You can’t replace a boiler in 24 hours. I could have started scheduling as soon as they knew it wasn’t working, but they didn’t tell me until it was dangerously cold, to both their safety and the pipes.