One of the darkest parts of the seemingly endless pandemic has been people's stories of wrestling with bad landlords during the waves of successive lockdowns and layoffs. The response of some of these people's landlords has seemed downright feudal.
A woman on TikTok named Katie is fighting back. When her landlord tried to raise the rent on her low-key squalid apartment, she got retribution by sabotaging the landlord's showings with not-so-subtle hints to the flat's disrepair strategically left all over the place.
It's the real estate version of fighting fire with fire, and people are loving it.
Katie, who goes by cornchipsandcorgis on the app, gave the video a caption that pretty much says it all:
"can u tell i live in a basement apartment with landlords that have the audacity to increase rent next year?"
But the tour she gives of her apartment makes the landlords' "audacity" all the more hard to believe—and will make anyone who's ever rented before break out in a cold sweat.
First, Katie shows off the jumbo-size bottle of Drano she prominently displays by the bathtub "so they know it doesn't drain." That right there would be enough to put a lot of us off this apartment and back to the real estate listings drawing board.
But it gets worse: Katie then rearranges objects to highlight the cracked, crumbling plaster in parts of the wall and sets out her collection of dehumidifiers she needs to keep the basement apartment from turning into a black mold death trap.
Then, like the mint on the pillow in a fancy hotel, Katie places in clear view on the floor the "scary nail" she found in the closet. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!
Katie's fellow TikTokers applauded her cunning revenge scheme.
@thetrulygruesome/TikTok
@kburnham01/TikTok
@thearielleview/TikTok
@dancingrabbit214/TikTok
@amo051117/TikTok
@cgi.vampire/TikTok
@jessica.again/TikTok
@seitenbachermuesli/TikTok
@mossrocks/TikTok
@microwavelight/TikTok
Watch out bad landlords, the tenants are onto you and they know how to fight back.
