Our homes are meant to be our safe space. Totally ours (or shared with family, roommates, etc), closed off from the rest of the troubling world. What happens, though, when even our homes feel unsafe?
For one woman on Twitter, who had a post go viral after exposing her previous apartment’s maintenance man, the answer is ‘we move as soon as possible’.
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Those used to apartment living are familiar with the rituals around maintenance.
You submit a request, a maintenance visit gets scheduled, and someone who works for or in tandem with your building comes to fix the problem. That’s how it should go and where it should end.
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, things can take a frightening turn.
That’s what happened to one Judgie Bee Jonez, or Bee.
Bee, @ThunderCatHeaux on Twitter, had a post of hers go viral recently in which she showed a gross overstepping of boundaries by her previous building’s maintenance man.
It all started one day when she received two texts from him that read, “Good morning girl,” and, “How u doing.”
The unit next to Bee’s had been recently vacated and ongoing maintenance was being performed there.
So her assumption was he needed into her unit to access something relating to that maintenance. She answered saying she was alright, then asked if he needed access to her apartment.
The response she got was far from what she was expecting.
Not to mention it immediately put her on edge.
He texted back, “Yes just [to] see ur face,” and “I miss u.” Bee could only respond plainly with, “Oh lol.”
In an interview with BuzzFeed, she said , “When I responded ‘oh lol,’ it was the same as an in real life nervous chuckle. I literally did not know how else to respond to that kind of message from a person I was not interested in. Even the nicest person can be harmful.”
But it only got worse from there.
After her response, the maintenance worker asked if he could come in. Bee told him no.
He said he was already here and that he was coming in anyway, so Bee again told him no. He responded saying he already opened the door. That’s when Bee threatened to call the police.
He immediately backed off after that.
He informed her that he is, in fact, in the empty apartment beside hers. He claims that he ‘got her’, insinuating that he thought this all to be some sort of prank, and he hopes everything is fine with her.
Thankfully, Bee still took this as a major red flag.
She realized how dangerous a man acting like that could be, especially one who doesn’t back off until under the threat of police.
“I broke the lease a month later and blocked him,” She said. “I felt unsafe, [so] I moved as soon as I had the resources to do so.”
Moving really was the only option for her, as the owners would have been no help.
As she explained, “[The owners] didn’t care about anything but the rent. All of the tenants had several complaints about various things. Nothing was ever handled.”
She also said that they hired friends and family to help with the building’s upkeep, meaning this maintenance worker might have been a friend of theirs, which could make reporting it even more difficult.
The replies to her tweet were full of support.
People congratulated her for getting out of there as soon as she could and scolded the man for being such a creep.
Among the replies were tons of similar stories from other women, proving this isn’t just some isolated incident. To this, Bee said, “I was really not surprised to see so many women share very similar stories. But even though I wasn’t surprised, I was saddened and angered that so many women could relate. Some men just feel entitled to women.”
h/t: BuzzFeed
