Before the pandemic hit, I always believed there was good people and bad people. My grey area wasn’t really in existence. Then the pandemic came and everything was turned upside down for everyone. Good people lost jobs and struggled. I was one of them. Our courts shut down and it was crickets for months with absolutely no work. These good people became desperate and frightened and rightly so. My residential tenancy clients always say to me, “I don’t understand, they were so nice to us when we first met them.” Unfortunately, human nature is what it is and when someone wants something from you, like an apartment to rent, you are going to get the best version of them. I believed that these were just bad people, playing games. I still do. Those people have not changed at all, they are who they are before the pandemic and are still the same people after the pandemic. They may even seem worse now as there is/was more opportunity to take advantage of people.
It is the good people I want to focus on. Over the years I have had good tenants find hard times and I like all of my clients as they are all good people, and they recognize that and work with the Tenants to help them get back on their feet. I have seen landlords buy food for their tenants and even go so far to babysit a child at one point. Good people, helping good people.
With the pandemic came a ton of change. The biggest one in my world is all communication and meetings are now virtual. I meet my clients on Zoom now instead of meeting in person. Some clients I have never met in real life as provincial court and the tribunals are also conducted by Zoom. Heck, I had a placement student for an entire semester that I have never met as we couldn’t even go to a restaurant! This change is staying and I think for the detriment to the world.
Why? Because this ability to hide behind a computer screen, an email account or the phone has given good people the courage to be slightly bad people. Behaviours that are now being tolerated and written off would NEVER be tolerated in the real person to person world.
So now we have grey people. These are the people who were good and are seeing opportunities to take advantage of someone’s situation and are taking it because they have the courage to do so while hiding behind some sort of electronic device.
I had one tenant, who I actually think was a good person who is now a grey person, try to get thousands from a landlord who was in a bad place and the tenant knew they needed the unit back. Oh, and by the way, we knew the tenant was leaving on a certain date already. The tenant basically said they would make the landlords life difficult (i.e. not give the keys back and although not living there, still keep possession of the unit) if they didn’t pay. You can’t get blood from a stone though, so when explained to the tenant that they are in a bad place because they couldn’t afford to pay for something else, they quietly left the unit. This was all done by phone and email. It is a small world and I know people, who know these people, and they are (were?) good people.
I think we are also becoming numb to this behavior and letting it slip when we would have never in the past. I was part of a 300 people Zoom call with the Landlord and Tenant Board when someone, what the Board calls a “Zoom Bomber”, was lovely enough to share their pornography with all of us. The Board presenters didn’t miss a beat. I am pretty sure there was a handful of us, if not more, who were frozen in shock but the Board members seemed to be completely numb to this and wrote it off and moved on.
I was never really a cynical person but am becoming more and more with the years that I work as a paralegal. The upside to have a digital profession is that one day I will move to the middle of nowhere in a log cabin with my Sklylink service and enjoy the bears and deer who stick to their true nature are who there are.
