rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Mess with My Home? Enjoy Your $1,000,000 Fee!
Episode Date: March 12, 2022r/Maliciouscompliance In today's episode, OP buys a home out in the country to enjoy a quiet life. A property development firm buys up all of the surrounding land and turns the quiet neighborhood into... a suburb. The developers then start pressuring OP into joining an HOA. OP refuses, which causes them to constantly harass OP over and over about the HOA. OP eventually gets sick of it and hires a lawyer. After some investigating, OP learns that the developers broke several laws in building these houses, resulting in fines exceeding $1,000,000! Go to ExpressVPN.com/slash to get 3 months free with a 1 year subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Welcome to our slash malicious compliance where OP costs a scummy developer millions of dollars.
Hey guys, quick disclaimer, I had a minor audio technical issue that kind of hit a couple
of my videos and this is one of those videos.
So you may notice slightly lower audio quality than normal in this video, but after a couple
of videos it should go back to normal.
Our next Reddit post is from NICE and not.
The setting, United States, Northern neck of Virginia.
The situation, I bought land and I built a house on it.
Back when my wife and I were much more newlywed than we are now, we hired ourselves an architect
and we went whole hog on having our cozy little dream house designed.
While this was being done, we went shopping around for a parcel of land on which to have
it built, which went quickly and easily, and we even for a parcel of land on which to have it
built, which went quickly and easily, and we even got a pretty nice deal on a half-acre
lot that was just far enough back in the sticks for us to be happy.
But also close enough to our jobs that it wasn't much of a commute.
And the best part of all, no homeowner's association.
There weren't any Haways in that area because point blank it was full of
poor people back there. These were dirt poor country types and working poor wage slave
types. We made very sure with our lawyer that no previous owner had ever had the title
amended to allow for any HOA nonsense as well because that's a thing that some real estate
developers like to do. Though buy up a property, get the title amended to force the membership of that property
into a local HOA, which they themselves usually operate, or their Inca hoots with those
who do, and then resell it with that as a new requirement for any prospective buyer
to automatically agree to when they sign the title.
Flash forward to August of 2019.
COVID was just around the corner, but nobody knew that yet.
Everything was normal, and my wife and I had since moved
to a different location, but we kept that property
as one of our various rentals.
It was our dream home for several years,
and we loved that place. Moving was tough.
It was a good neighborhood out there,
and folks were very welcoming.
Then a company that's totally not named Ryan Holmes or anything even slightly similar came in
and spent some years buying everything up back there and pressuring folks into selling,
which worked out for them only too well. And, of course, they gentrified everything. For about
three years, there was massive amounts of old houses being torn
down, hauled out, and new horses being built up in salt. An HOA was built right in because
of course it was. Folks who had enough money to waste on awful houses that looked nice
from their front moved in one by one and two by two. Property taxes skyrocketed right
along with them, and more of the less poor people
were forced to sell because they got taxed out of their own homes. My wife and I knew
what was coming from the get-go. We knew those dinguses from totally not Ryan homes were
going to come sniffing around our way, not to try to buy us out, but to see if they
could finagle, shmuz, or threaten us into joining the H-A-W-A they were installing.
It was inevitable. Lots of information is in the public record. They knew that we had
money. They knew that we were living below our means by two orders of magnitude. They
knew that we clearly intended to be exactly where we were because we sure didn't have
to be. They knew they didn't have a snowflakes hope and hell in pricing us out on taxes, so they
tried nagging us to death and coming right up to the line of harassment, always to talk
to us about joining the HOA.
They failed.
They got told by a very expensive lawyer to find something else to do before we got
super busy helping them find things to worry about. And so they stopped for a few years.
Then my wife and I moved and got the property set up as a rental.
Then Ryan Homes started bothering our tenants there.
Both trying to get them to pressure us into putting the property into the H away, as well
as getting our tenants riled up with the most outrageous lies about what could happen if
we, the owners couldn't protect our renters better.
My wife and I were livid about hearing about this nonsense.
So we got a hold of Ryan Holmes to let them know that this was our formal request to stop
bothering our tenants and that all further communication would be from our very expensive
lawyer.
They must have assumed that we were bluffing.
Or maybe whoever was in charge of thinking that they didn't show up for work because they just kept right on with their nonsense.
It got so bad that they were even sending fake but convincing looking envelopes with
eviction notice on the front that when open said, could be what you find in your mailbox
one day without our wondrous HOA, and then containing information about the benefits of an HOA.
We gathered up all the information, got the tenants to talk to our lawyer, and got the police
involved to get the ball rolling on a harassment investigation.
Another formal cease and desist letter was sent to Ryan Holmes by our very expensive lawyer,
which they utterly ignored.
I think they're one guy who was supposed to come into work and actually think about things
quite a long time ago.
Maybe he never told anyone.
Maybe nobody noticed.
Whatever the situation on their end, when my lawyer talked to their lawyer, their lawyer
told my lawyer that their client was doing everything legally, and that if we wanted to pursue
this matter in court, then that's what we would have to do.
So we did.
I'm not sure what kind of lawyer magic that my lawyer and his fellow legal demons worked
out on this front, but we were in court for one single hour when my lawyer and therefore
lawyers and the judge had a private talk after their preliminary hearing.
Half an hour later, the lawyers from Ryan Homes came back into the courtroom looking like
a quartet of cats who'd been pissed on.
My lawyer took a seat beside me and said, they're gonna settle.
And I was like, I didn't think that we were that far into this yet.
What happened?
He said, they built 51 Homes in this county over two years.
Every single one of them was inspected before a close of sale by a real estate agent
that never actually got around
to getting her home inspector license.
And that's how Ryan Holmes paid me $10,000 to not sue them,
all while they got bent over by the County and the state
and tag team like the new boy with the pretty lips
in a prison yard.
The developer got throat punched repeatedly by county and state for probably millions
of dollars in fines, fees, and settlements, all because they never lawfully inspected their
homes before turning them over.
I got 10 grand in the settlement, which my wife and I gave to the tenants in that property
because they deserved it, and we really didn't need it anyways.
Our next reddit post is from plugged in, but did.
Background.
I live in an apartment building with a backyard.
The lane lady has set up drawing lines in one part of the backyard, and we're free
to use them.
I live on the ground floor, and my apartment has direct access to the backyard.
I work from home, so I'm almost always here every day.
Now I have a perfect view of the lines, and I can see if there are any clothes hanging
on them.
Sometimes a fellow resident will hang their clothes and either forget about them or be
somewhere else when it's raining.
So what I usually do is bring the clothes in and leave them in the little waiting room
that we have in the building where they can easily find it.
It's happened enough time that everyone already knows that I'm the one doing it.
A few weeks ago, one of the residents came to me and complained about how I handled their clothes.
She said that I laid them down on a dirty surface or that I rumped them too much,
but they were just washed, so of course there'd be creases. She might have also
insinuated that some pieces were missing. I do not cross dress, nor do I have a fascination for other people's clothes.
She ended her complaints with, I'd rather you not touch my clothes in any way.
That's the first time someone's complained to me about rescuing their freshly laundered
clothes.
I didn't think much about it until today.
A few hours ago, I saw that same lady hanging her clothes to dry.
Fast forward to now, and I'm looking at them
getting drenched from this awesome rain. She did tell me not to touch them. I'm currently working
in front of the window so I can see when she finally takes them down. Maybe I'll give her a wave.
Then OP post in an update. She finally took her clothes in some time ago, and she asked me why I
didn't bring them in. I reminded her of our past conversation, and she asked me why I didn't bring them in. I reminded her
of our past conversation, and she called me something that I'm not gonna repeat on YouTube.
I do feel a bit sorry, because some of the clothes were apparently her work uniforms,
and I know that she'll be working early tomorrow. Yeah, I only feel just a bit sorry, though.
Then, O.P. Edds, I just received a text from our land lady asking why this neighbor
is pissed at me.
Apparently, the resident made a complaint, Loll.
I told the land lady everything, and she also called me a bad word, but in a positive
sense.
She said I shouldn't worry about it because it doesn't violate any of the building's
rules.
Huh, what would that complaint even be?
I told my neighbor not to do me a favor, and then they didn't do me a favor, but I actually
wanted them to do me the favor, so can you evict them please?
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Our next Reddit post is from Artform Mortician.
So for context, I'm a 20-something British-American male living in a very southern and uneducated
part of the U.S. of A.
I've been here for a while now, and generally when I tell people where I'm from, I get
a little pushback because I don't
really have that thick of an accent anymore.
Okay, onto the story.
I work in a small office, and we have a rolling line of temps that come and go.
Most of them are barely high school graduates, or people with very little in the way of
world-to-experience.
This is important for later.
So one day, they bring in their usual parade of new hires and I do my introduction.
Hi, I'm OP, I'm one of the recruiters here at Company X. I'm married with two dogs and I'm originally from the UK.
Normally, this is just a throwaway line that I use as an icebreaker and it normally rolls right off.
Until this one wonderful young woman pipes up.
Um, you don't sound British.
She, of course, left out the tea very purposefully.
Sorry, love, I forgot my code entails at home, I say.
The group kind of laughed it off, and I figured it was a pretty open and shut deal.
Nope.
A couple of days later, word gets around that this chick has been telling a bunch of people
that I'm not British and that I'm lying for clout.
She said that I don't even sound British and that she's dating a British guy and she knows how
they act. So rather than be a mature adult, I do the very British thing of malicious compliance.
When I need an intern to bring me some tea, would you mind climbing the apples and pears and
pouring me a cup of rosy leaf? I started wearing three-piece suits, a pocket watch, and a
Monaco that I found at a thrift shop. I went super-say-in-level three British.
Obviously, about three hours into the first day of doing this, my boss wants to know what's up.
I tell her, and she finds it so hilarious that she assigns that intern to me for the rest of the day.
I kept using odd British rhyming phrases and sayings, and she would have to intern to me for the rest of the day. I kept using odd
British rhyming phrases and sayings and she would have to keep asking me to speak normal.
I'd reply, but I thought you know how as British people act. She quickly realized her error,
and we've been cordial ever since. Nowadays, I keep my old red passport in my desk drawer,
just in case someone tries to pull that stunt again.
And for the record, I'm not British, I'm English, and a Scouser at that.
I literally have no idea what this last sentence means.
I don't know what a Scouser is, and I don't know the difference between British and English.
What is the difference?
English refers to only people who are from England specifically.
Thus to be English is not to be Scottish,
Welsh, or Northern Irish. British, on the other hand, refers to anything from Great
Britain, meaning anyone who lives in Scotland, Wales or England. Oh, okay, I see.
What is a scouser? Because that sounds like a racial slur. It is a liver poolian. Down
in the comments, we have this post from Ronark. In their early days of tech support being
shifted to India, I was working at Dell headquarters in Texas. The guy who sat behind me was from
London. Normally, this wasn't very noteworthy. He just had the most interesting accent on
our team. But one day, he gets this lady on the line who's really upset because she called
home support first and her call was into a call center in India. After a cross-continental and
cross-departmental transfer, she's on the phone with Philip, and I hear half the conversation.
Excuse me? Yes, this is Del Hidquarters in Austin, Texas. Well, yes, you're correct.
We're technically in Round Rock, Texas. But most people don't even know Round Rock, so
I usually say that we're in Austin. Yes, I'm sorry.
No, I'm being honest, I'm in round rock right now.
You want to talk to someone who speaks English, but I'm literally an English man.
So then, he transferred her back to India.
Our next Reddit post is from Asmo.
When I was in grad school, I got a job at an in department office that ordered and maintained
testing supplies.
I started off at the bottom of the ladder, but I was willing to learn more.
By my second year in the program, I was promoted to manager and given a 75 cent raise.
Woo!
The work wasn't too difficult.
I was responsible for taking requests from processors, getting price quotes from the companies,
getting the price quotes approved and placing orders.
There were some other duties, but that was the most difficult part of my job.
Occasionally, I would have to deal with our ordering department when they messed up in order.
I reorganized the office in a more efficient manner and created multiple new systems for
dealing with issues.
I practically ran that place for several years, and it ran well most of the time.
During that time we hired a bunch of new employees.
They just wanted an easy job, but my boss wouldn't take my recommendation on who to hire.
In my fourth year in the program, I was asked to order some test kits by one of the program
heads.
The test kits were related and I found out they could be ordered as a combo kit that would
save us space, but cost a little bit more.
We were low on space, so I figured it'd be worth it.
I got the price quote, and I got it approved by the program head and then the department head.
I placed the order.
When the kits arrived, the program head was thrilled with the combined kits, and thought they were fantastic.
Several weeks later, my boss informed me that I shouldn't have
ordered the combined kits, that they'd emptied the program's budget, and that the program
head would have never approved them if she'd known. Luckily for me, I had the emails of me
sending her the price quote with both price per unit and total cost and her approving them.
My boss was rather stunned that the program had lied, but insisted that I
take the fall for it. She told me that I could either take a demotion or quit. I'm pretty
sure she thought that I would take the demotion, but I quit instead. The joke was on her, none
of the other employees were willing to do that much, and they all refused to be trained
on ordering. The joke around the office was that I had managed to burn down the office after I left.
It was in complete chaos for months because my boss, who had a bunch of other responsibilities,
had to figure out how to also do all the stuff that I did single-handedly.
That was our Slash Militius Compliance, and if you liked this content be sure to follow
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