Imagine living in an apartment, and your fire alarm stops working. Would you replace it yourself, or would you call the landlord?

In this story, one tenant was in this situation, and they knew the landlord was supposed to replace it. However, the landlord didn’t believe them!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Landlord Maliciously Complianced Themselves

This happened a few years ago, in my last apartment. My roommate and I were living in a basement place with upstairs neighbors, and the owner decided he wanted to sell.

The upstairs neighbors ended up buying it, and became our new landlords. And they … were awful at it.

I could fill a whole post with the amount of stuff they tried to get away with, but we’re here to talk about one particular instance.

But suffice to say, they had no idea that landlords had “responsibilities” and simply saw us tenants as a source of income that should be ever growing (hence our rent suddenly spiking, and why we left).

They really did try to get the tenants to agree to some crazy things.

But there was one time they maliciously complianced themselves.

See, they had a habit of trying to push stuff on us that was blatantly illegal.

Their first contract, for example, said among other things that they had the right to enter the apartment at any time they wanted and could go through our stuff if they wished because we were “living on their property.”

I pointed out that this was highly illegal, and they grew very upset, saying “Well, we’ll see about that.”

This clause later suddenly became the real one before we signed.

There was another problem.

One day, however, our lone fire alarm stopped working. As dutiful tenants, we reached out and said “Hey, the fire alarm stopped working.”

Their response was a predictable sort of ‘So what?’

“We need to have a working fire alarm,” we replied. “And it’s the landlord’s duty to provide working fire alarms.”

“No it’s not. You want one, you get it.”

“The law says otherwise.”

The landlord’s response was pretty crazy!

And here’s where they maliciously complianced themselves.

Possibly because they were getting tired of being corrected, they got snooty with this one. We got a very sarcastic response. “Oh, it does, does it? Well, we’ll just see what the FIRE MARSHAL has to say about THAT!”

Me and my roommate, upon recieving this message, burst out laughing.

But they were serious. They thought they were going to contact the fire marshal, he was going to side with them, and then they could come down on us hard.

I don’t know what their expressions were when we said “Okay, yeah do that!”

Uh-oh!

However … The next morning there’s frantic knocking at our door. There’s the landlord and his family, looking very concerned, with a bag of brand-new fire alarms, one for each room and IIRC even two spares.

He begs to be let in outside of the 24-hour notice, and says its an emergency: He has to put these alarms up RIGHT NOW.

Trying not to laugh, we let them in, and they hurriedly put one in every single room, apologizing profusely for the “delay” and telling us “if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask!”

I don’t know how that meeting with the fire marshal went, or if they got him or someone else at their office, but their attitude painted a pretty clear picture of the ultimate result.

They complied maliciously, thinking they’d called our bluff. Whoops.

I wonder how the conversation with the fire marshal went. There must have been some pretty serious consequences if they didn’t install the fire alarms immediately.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person knows you should avoid fire marshals.

I would’ve been tempted to do the same thing!

The fines can really add up.

Another person knows that fire marshals don’t mess around.

You don’t want to get on the bad side of a fire marshal!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.