Manager no-shows at work, so the janitor pretends to be the manager and steals his job.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. The management company that oversees my apartment

building has always been total crap. Packages go missing from the mail room, repairs take forever,

staff are unfriendly, not at all worth what we pay in fees.

There was only one solid employee, and he almost made up for everyone else's incompetence.

The janitor, Ruan. He kept everything sparkling clean and even pitched in when other people slacked off,

helping with repairs, ID checking in the lobby, and more, just because he took pride in the building.

Then the corporate oversight of the management company changed, and the new boss was having all of the properties inspected to do a quality spot check on the individual building managers.

Our manager, the winner that he is, decided the best course of action would be to not come in the day of the oversight

visit so that it would have to be cancelled. The hope was the checker would just inspect what he could

without the manager on site, which wasn't much since he'd already have made the trip out there.

My apartment has terrible cell reception and no AC, so I spend a ton of time downstairs in the lobby, which has both. I was able

to overhear most of the planning for this visit as a result. Arjanica, Ruan, knew as well,

and he was spiffing everything up like new in excitement, fixing a few broken things the repair

guys ignored, and even just bringing in fresh-cut flowers to the lobby out of his own pocket.

Ruan dressed up in a collared shirt and car keys for the visit. He didn't know the manager

was bailing, I just heard it hanging out in the lobby late one night. So when the corporate

inspector arrived, Ruan was the only guy he saw. He was dressed up, so the inspector

shook his hand and started rattling off the things he

wanted shown to him. Ruan knows the building better than anyone else on the staff, so you could

tell he was a little overwhelmed at being seen as the point person, but he knew the answers to

every one of the inspector's questions. Meanwhile, a few tenants and contractors who frequent the building

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