I did this as well after having a couple of snooping landlords.
Also it's empowering. One rental I had, prior to the tenancy deposit protection scheme I had a serial con artist landlord. At the end of the tenancy, he billed my entire £600 deposit return to three companies he owned. One for gardening, one for cleaning and one for maintenance. This made it difficult for a claim to be placed upon him. This was without entering the property, because I had changed the locks. The property was left immaculate. I took photos to cover my arse. Edit: to note I completely ripped out the overgrown garden in that time and cleaned it up to the point it was workable and decorated half the place so I added value to his property. He evicted us because he could rent it out for more money.
Retribution was simple. He didn't have a valid address on the tenancy contract. When he asked where to return the keys to, he sent me an SMS to just put them through the letter box. So I did. I put the keys inside a zip lock bag and used an 8 foot bamboo stick to poke them through the letterbox half way down the hall, double locked the security door from the outside and chucked the keys for the actual barrels down the drain in the street. My wife decided to add insult to this injury by spreading marmite all around the inside of the letter box.
The next morning I woke up to about 20 missed calls and 3 voice mails calling me all sorts of names and threatening to kill me and was going to sue me for new locks and a new shirt.
I went and bought another pay as you go SIM and never heard a thing.
Edit: just looked the guy up. He's still going. If you rent in Nottingham, keep an eye out for a cunt who turns up on a motorbike. Ask for a passport or driving license for ID from direct rent landlords, not just business correspondence.
We changed the locks originally because we caught him in the place doing an inspection unannounced. All our clothes had been gone through and the computer turned on. Funny sounding inspection.
The marmite was deserved. If you’re going to make someone’s life miserable and insecure for six months then we’re going to roll out the red carpet on pettiness.
Nothing is gained by being an asshole to an asshole. All you've done is provided him with documentable proof for how terrible and vindictive he thinks you are. It doesn't matter if every other claim he's made about you was a lie.
How does smearing marmite make the unfair gain worthless? It might make you feel smug for a few hours, but if your enemy is vindictive, it could be used against you.
I just asked my other half how she was feeling about it after 16 years and she laughed so clearly petty justice has a lasting effect.
I think the person in question would be in vastly larger amounts of trouble for even raising his head above the cesspool he floated in for a moment. It would be like a chase from the Benny Hill show with local housing enforcement, HMRC, the police and a trail of angry and abused tenants.
The best move is making the game worthless so there are no winners. Shit on the board. It's a stalemate then.
Unlikely. There was some intelligence behind it. He was aware the locks had been changed as I explained his in an SMS so I did what he asked explicitly. Secondly I could apologise for the mistake of leaving the wrong keys inside the property. As for the marmite, some kid did a prank! Ooops. Based on the police's previous attitude, would they likely come out for a bit of marmite in a letterbox.
The put the keys through the letterbox thing was actually a masterpiece of idiocy on his part which I refrained from mentioning to him.
I think you need to read my post again, I'm not talking about real ethics or so-called Christian ethics. I'm talking about doing what's in your selfish best interest. Put simply, don't do things that can be used against you by your enemy.
Maybe it's my hyper-legal American sentiments (pardon the joke at the expense of America's litigious culture, if that's not your particular breed of sardonic humor), but I'm in full agreement here and a little surprised at some of the comments waving this off as anything other than something that would result in justifiable legal-reprisal, if the landlord really wanted to mess with people.
But again, that's probably (very most likely) just the result of me existing in a hyper-litigious culture where In pari delicto is very much a thing.
Right, but now he's telling his mates about how his absolute arsehole of a tenant spread marmite on his letterbox for no reason whatsoever. He still has a story, except this one just makes tenants look evil.
I'm a Brit who has been living in the US for over a decade now. Every now and then I try to introduce American friends and co-workers to the delights of Marmite, but to no avail. Luckily for me, it's relatively easy and affordable to purchase Marmite via Amazon.
To anyone reading this: if this happens to you, please talk to a lawyer. Please do something to protect future tenants, get the landlord's info online. Don't seek retribution just for yourself.
> We changed the locks originally because we caught him in the place doing an inspection unannounced. All our clothes had been gone through and the computer turned on. Funny sounding inspection.
That may be a criminal act in your jurisdiction. My local laws allow the landlord access, but the landlord needs to provide 48h notice of the inspection (with a list of specific exceptions for emergency work, mostly around plumbing and electrical work) and cannot bar the tenant from being present during the inspection.
I experienced stuff like that from a couple of landlords while I was a student - one of the reasons I was quite happy to buy my first flat at 23 (mind you - that was a long time ago).
Edit: I almost attacked one landlord when I found someone rummaging in a cupboard at night! Landlord was quite indignant when we pointed out he couldn't come and go as he pleased.
Yeah that's roughly what happened here. Although I knew he was likely in there because he parked his motorbike outside.
He was actually in my 2 year old daughter's bedroom when I opened the door. I heard him leave it and come down the stairs.
Small argument ensued and he sent me an SMS right there on his phone saying that he was coming to do an inspection on date X which was that day. Then said "oh sorry must have been delayed" with a smirk on his face, got back on his motorbike and rode off.
That's probably a great way to get shot, especially in the US. Not only is sneaking into a tenants place (at night of all times) an asshole move, likely illegal, and a clear abuse of power, but it's also such an incredibly stupid thing to do if you value your life.
Nothing at all. Paid on time every time and basically decorated the place. Went on the market for £100/month more the moment the tenancy expired and he evicted us.
The guy ran umbrella companies to hide his assets and address and to rip people off, got caught going through our stuff.
He’s still a landlord and has been the director of about 12 companies now in the last 20 years all dissolved.
Who’s the bad one? Hmm
Edit: also the place we had after that I rented for 11 years with no problems direct from landlord and they were excellent and we were excellent back.
And you basically did a disservice to all his future tenants by not reporting him to the police after being caught by you illegally accessing your home and destroying your property? By not reacting you basically silently allowed him to keep doing this. I would understand that he had some kind of power over you and you were afraid to react and report him, but you choose to confront him by being asshole to him, without doing the right thing and reporting him to whatever authority in UK is responsible for this.
Because of that, both of you are bad, though he is a bit worse.
Actually it's not quite that easy. If you think anyone even gives a crap about this sort of stuff then you're mistaken. Even today.
Firstly, I spoke to the police and they said they couldn't do anything because I likely couldn't prove he was snooping and couldn't prove that it wasn't against the terms and it wouldn't be worthy of their time investigating it and it was probably a civil or contractual issue. "go see a solicitor". Which I couldn't afford.
Secondly, local housing officer was contacted and I was asked to attend the local council about it and I sat there for 4 hours and was told to go home because they had run out of time. I got a letter apologising and attempts to get a second appointment were fruitless.
This was option three.
This was one of the points in my life I realised there is no magical state run safety blanket who will protect you from dickheads.
Sounds familiar. I have some friends suing their old landlord for essentially walking off with their entire deposit (several thousands of £). They moved out of that place more than a year ago - the case is still working its way through the courts. Nothing is simple.
Oh screw that. Come into my home when I'm not there, and enter my 2 year old daughter's room? If the police don't see that as a crime, it's vigilante time. The chances your landlord wasn't attempting some creepy perverted shit is zero to none.
Have you considered some of the landlord's actions might not have been illegal? Anyone from the UK that can chime in on this? Is there an authority responsible for this?
Here's a clause from a U.K. (England and Wales) lease agreement that is pretty standard:
35. Landlord's Covenant for Quiet Enjoyment
The Landlord covenants with the Tenant, that, so long as the Tenant pays the rents reserved by and complies with the obligations of this lease, the Tenant shall have quiet enjoyment of the Property without any interruption by the Landlord or any person claiming under the Landlord except as otherwise permitted by this lease.
There are clauses covering emergency entry for repairs (e.g. burst water pipes, leaking gas) in short-term rental agreements but - as others have said - they require "reasonable" notice in almost all cases aside from dire emergency, and the tenant can still refuse entry.
It's not quite that straightforward here in the UK. Well it is but the other way. The landlord has no right to enter a property outright. The property is for exclusive enjoyment by the tenant according to law. They can give 24 hours' notice and enter to do repairs etc but you can refuse that outright and they have no rights beyond that without taking you to court.
If they turn up unannounced this is actually harassment under UK law.
We had some rather unpleasant slum landlords between the 1950s and 1970s which caused a few laws to be introduced. Unfortunately the nature of being a landlord seems to attract certain people who find new and creative ways to be dicks. Not the majority of landlords I will say who are mostly pretty good, but enough to cause problems.
You might be interested in the not very good movie "Pacific Heights" about a psychopathic tenant, if you want to see a fictional telling of how bad it can get for a landlord.
I certainly understand how bad it can get for landlords. I'm not excusing any bad tenants here for sure. I will at least read the synopsis for that film :)
I thought I went too far for a few years to be honest. Now I realise that no protection whatsoever was afforded to any private tenants back then other than taking the landlord to court which was expensive, time consuming, resulted in unpaid days off work and generally a waste of time. The moral high ground doesn't necessarily drive the point home either.
Now we have a deposit scheme in the UK which stops landlords doing this because the deposit is held in trust. The landlord has to prove it. Therefore there's escrow and a third party involved. Not being in this scheme is illegal and results in fines that go directly to the tenant as well.
This action is not necessary now, but changing the locks still is because it's your personal space and security and you genuinely don't know who has access to that unless you do it. Could even be the previous tenants with key copies.
There are two types of eviction in England: section 8 (non-payment of rent) and section 21 (no blame).
There are strict protections around section 21 during the "fixed term" (normally 6 months to a year), but after that it's pretty easy to get tenants out even if they've done nothing wrong, and it's common to evict tenants, re-paint, then re-let the property at a big markup.
If you're a tenant in England it's probably a good idea to talk to the landlord each year about a small rent increase.
For now. Apparently we got a big chunk of our energy imported and there’s Brexit on so we’re going back to coal fired Teslas and eating grass and our own shoes pretty soon I reckon.
I'm playing with the PIC10F320 at the moment. Minimalism is fun. $0.50 in 1 off quantities. 6-pin SOT-23 package. 16MHz. 0.5K of program space. 64 bytes of RAM. Waveform generator. ADC. Timers. PWM and the coolest thing a configurable logic cell which works while the CPU is asleep.
I've got a semi-working morse iambic keyer in that and it uses 40uA of current running flat out. I'm working on sleeps now. I reckon I can get it down to 100nA average based on the wake time and 20nA sleep current. I can't actually measure down that low even with my 5.5 digit HP 3478A
My issue is across the whole windows platform not just WSL. If you check large repos out on windows native it sucks too. Rather than just fixing WSL and declaring victory they should fix the NTFS problem.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but this doesn't seem to be a compelling example. He's in an extradition hearing for something that happened 9 years ago, and the article says "the extradition process could take years".
This hearing is the beginning of the process, and unnecessary delay at this point would be unsettling (leaving him wondering whether the other shoe will ever drop).
The fact that the very first hearing took place only weeks after Britain got him in custody doesn’t say anything about how quickly other hearings will take place, when a decision will be made, etc. It’s really silly to call for everyone to slow down at this point.
Not necessarily. Climate change is arguably destroying the U.S. through droughts, hurricanes, floods, etc. But you don't see the U.S. react so swiftly.
It's really when the interests of those in power that are affected, that the "state acts so quickly."
Folks will argue how much and when, but the US state is still a democracy and people elected people who oppose action on climate change... it makes sense.
Last time I was arrested it took 2 years of going to court once every 2 months, saying that there is no movement on my case before it was straightened out. This all for a very minor offense that I happily plead guilty to after the lawyers had sorted everything out. I could have just as easily plead guilty and paid all my fees on day one if the legal system in the US actually functioned.
The right to a speedy trial is held by the individual, not the state. It is not a safeguard to liberty if proceedings move so quickly that the individual cannot mount and adequate defense. This is particularly true of extradition, a situation where there is no room to correct an improper decision acted upon.
Siri is still half deaf and tries to send me to the chip shop when I ask it to send a message and they have a ridiculous amount of budget behind that so probably not.
At the moment our technology is like Zorg’s desk in Fifth Element. Stuffed full of toys but ultimately will let you down too often to be relied upon.
Do you have an accent by any chance - pretty much all voice recognition technology (Android, Apple, cars...) appears to be utterly flummoxed by my fairly mild Scottish accent.
[Edit: to be fair, my accent is probably fairly mild by Scottish standards, not compared to RP].
They still treat their enterprise customers like shit, have no opt out data collection on all their platforms now, are extending their tentacles across everything that has a processor in it, QA has actually dropped off a cliff and they've left a half finished charred pile of shit for an OS on our laps, disposable low quality line of tablet wannabees and have piled their entire effort into marketing away their problems rather than delivery.
But everyone focuses on Nadella being the second coming of corporate Jesus. Wolf in sheep's clothing I'm afraid. In ten years I bet you I am not wrong on this.
Honestly I think that windows is the best desktop platform out there (seeing as Apple can't make a keyboard that works) with all the compromises but it's difficult to actually compliment it in any way. We could be somewhere a lot better and everyone knows where that is.
For earnings and shareholders they're doing good. But for the customers, not necessarily. They're just doing barely ok in an ocean of crap.
What? I have a somewhat recent surface. It’s brilliant. It forced the entire windows ecosystem to rethink their approach.
Behind the scenes for that miserable OS, is a mountain of work to make all their parts work. No longer will there be three tcp-ip implementations over Xbox,OS,server and other teams.
A lot of this was started under ballmer. It’s comtinuing under nadella.
Gyms always run unsubscribe scams like this. It's rife here in the UK. After getting screwed similarly I said fuck it and just run around the local park.
Also it's empowering. One rental I had, prior to the tenancy deposit protection scheme I had a serial con artist landlord. At the end of the tenancy, he billed my entire £600 deposit return to three companies he owned. One for gardening, one for cleaning and one for maintenance. This made it difficult for a claim to be placed upon him. This was without entering the property, because I had changed the locks. The property was left immaculate. I took photos to cover my arse. Edit: to note I completely ripped out the overgrown garden in that time and cleaned it up to the point it was workable and decorated half the place so I added value to his property. He evicted us because he could rent it out for more money.
Retribution was simple. He didn't have a valid address on the tenancy contract. When he asked where to return the keys to, he sent me an SMS to just put them through the letter box. So I did. I put the keys inside a zip lock bag and used an 8 foot bamboo stick to poke them through the letterbox half way down the hall, double locked the security door from the outside and chucked the keys for the actual barrels down the drain in the street. My wife decided to add insult to this injury by spreading marmite all around the inside of the letter box.
The next morning I woke up to about 20 missed calls and 3 voice mails calling me all sorts of names and threatening to kill me and was going to sue me for new locks and a new shirt.
I went and bought another pay as you go SIM and never heard a thing.
Edit: just looked the guy up. He's still going. If you rent in Nottingham, keep an eye out for a cunt who turns up on a motorbike. Ask for a passport or driving license for ID from direct rent landlords, not just business correspondence.