reptilescorpio
Member
lol well. Off the record yes. Daily.
They aren't all bad though. Like, 25% are terrible people probably. Working responsive maintenance means you mainly come across the people who make a mess or feel comfortable calling up a hotline to get someone else to fix their house. This doesn't really include the people who have unavoidable issues (like HWS breaking down, which is really hard to mistreat thankfully!) so some tradies have it easier than others.
Generally though the tradies are treated really well by tenants, after all they are the ones who are doing a job for them for free. Also the tradies can only do what is requested of them by Housing so if a tenant has some beef over not getting something fixed they will rage at Housing, not the contractor who has no choice in the matter. Most tend to settle into the work and hit upon different strategies for getting in the tenants good books, sometimes with hilarious results!
Having a bad run in the courts down here this past fortnight where 99% of people are from public housing though which is depressing. I would tar everyone with the same brush, plenty of nice people out there but we rarely hear from them. Although this week was bad with the cops needing to be called on a few of them, as well as one contractor being racially abused well beyond usual levels.
There is a fuckload of money to be made though if you can knuckle out what parts of work you lose money on and profit from. Most importantly, recession proof! People break shit quicker than it can be fixed so most tradies take much, much lower rates to take on public housing work as it is a constant flow of tons of work.
You just need to put it out of your mind that it is all tax payer dollars, otherwise you get sad again
