r/ProRevenge - Stop! Legal action time!

hey everybody today's stories may get a bit controversial leave your comments below who's right who's wrong last year i moved out of a house that i had rented for five years with no problems i always had a good relationship with the landlord there are two relevant bits of background to this story one in the uk where i live the standard practice when renting a house is to sign a tenancy agreement for a year at the end of the year if you want to stay in the house and the landlord is happy with that you can just do nothing and the tenancy will continue automatically until either tenant or landlord gives notice alternatively you can sign a new one-year tenancy agreement each year which isn't really necessary but some landlords want it my landlord wanted me to sign a new tenancy agreement each year fine whatever so since i rented the house for five years there were five tenancy agreements in total two by law the landlord was required to protect my security deposit that meant that she had to put it into a special kind of account within 30 days of receiving it the tenant then receives login details for the account so that they can check that it's protected and view various info about it one point of doing this is so that the deposit is held by an independent party who can mediate if the landlord and tenant disagree about any deductions there is a dispute process that the tenant can request in which is free for the tenant to use so i'd been living in the house for almost five years and i gave notice to end the tenancy because i was buying a house after i'd given notice the landlord emailed me to ask if i was planning to hire a gardener to ensure that the garden would be returned to the pretty manicured state it was in when i moved in i thought this was strange because my tenancy agreement explicitly forbade me from doing the sorts of things in the garden that would have been necessary to maintain its original state for example it said that i was not allowed to lop any shrubs or bushes so all i'd been doing is cutting the grass and the hedge basically that claws looked like something that a landlord would include if they planned to maintain the garden themselves except she didn't maintain it while i was living there in retrospect it seems that she didn't read her own tenancy agreement properly i replied to the landlord's email about the garden i quoted the part of the tenancy agreement that forbade me from doing certain things in the garden and expressed my confusion i asked her to clarify what her expectations were about the state of the garden given what it said in the tenancy agreement she didn't reply but a couple of weeks later i received an email from her husband boyfriend telling me that the landlord was anxious about the garden and i should ensure that it is returned to the same state as at the start of the tenancy i replied to him and again asked for clarification given the wording of the tenancy agreement he replied saying he'd have the landlord get back to me herself which she never did without any guidance about the garden i just did my best with it my boyfriend who is an experienced gardener did the work here i asked him just to do whatever he thought was best he cut back bushes and cleared loads of stuff i spent a few hundred pound pound pound on having garden waste removed i knew that technically i did not need to do that but wanted to do what i could to keep relations good between me and the landlord i moved out the tenancy ended and after not hearing anything from the landlord for a couple of weeks and not having my deposit back i emailed the landlord to ask about the deposit having ignored my queries about the garden before the end of the tenancy she chose this moment to announce that she wanted to deduct 400 pounds from my deposit to carry out work on the garden there followed a really time wasting back and forth by email in which i pointed out that the terms of the tenancy agreement were incompatible with my being able to maintain the original state of the garden and she just kept repeating that the garden was not returned to her in its original state in the end i suggested that since we couldn't agree about deductions from my deposit we should use the independent dispute process offered by the company that was holding the deposit that process needs to be kicked off by the landlord so i asked her to authorize it she didn't do that instead she kept wasting my time by sending me emails trying to negotiate an amount to put the garden right which i wasn't going to entertain meanwhile i could not log into the account where my deposit was being held i contacted the company and it turned out that my landlord had accidentally input my email address incorrectly when registering the deposit which i found very strange because she had emailed me successfully dozens of times throughout the time i was living in the house so she definitely knew my email address without being able to log in i was unable to officially dispute any deductions she was proposing there is a window of three months after the end of the tenancy when you can dispute any deductions after that you either take what the landlord is willing to return or go to court apparently according to justice for tenants who i contacted for advice it's relatively common for unscrupulous landlords to register their tenant's details incorrectly in an attempt to make it harder for them to recover their deposits in the time frame available for disputes i had a long back and forth with the deposit company after which i finally gained access to my deposit account when i got into it i looked at the info and noticed that the landlord had not protected my deposit until the day after i gave her notice to end the tenancy that meant she protected my deposit well after the 30-day deadline by which she was supposed to do it by law there are penalties for landlords that fail to comply with the laws around tenancy deposits if they break the rules and the tenant takes them to court they have to return the full deposit plus between one and three times the amount of the deposit is compensation also they are not allowed to make any deductions from a tenant's deposit if they haven't complied with the law i emailed the landlady a bit more firmly than i had previously things had been cordial but increasingly frosty i pointed out that she could not make any deductions from my deposit because she had not complied with the law she responded by sending me quite a tantrum insulting email and authorizing the return of my full deposit so yea for the deposit back but what a beach insulting me when i hadn't done anything wrong i was pissed off by the fact that she tried to rip me off and wasted hours and hours of my time trying to sort this out not to mention the stress just seeing an email from her land in my inbox caused my stomach to flip by this point this is when things started to get a bit more exciting as i said above landlords who don't comply with the law around tenancy deposits have to pay between one and three times the value of the deposit in compensation plus return the full deposit if they get taken to court the documentation from the tenancy deposit scheme proved that she had broken the law i'd already had my deposit back but it was clear that if i took her to court i would receive a minimum of that amount again except of course i didn't have just the one tenancy agreement with her as i already mentioned she had insisted on my signing a new tenancy agreement every year so i'd had five tenancy agreements in total i spent a few hours checking the law and going through old emails and documentation and it turned out that she had failed to protect my deposit correctly in all of the five tenancies i had with her i had a ton of documentation to prove that that meant that if i took her to court i stood to receive a minimum of not one but five times the amount of my original deposit over 6.5 000 pounds it would cost me a couple of hundred pound to take her to court and i was 100 willing to do that in fact at this point i was relishing that prospect in order to take her to court i first had to send her a letter before action in which i set out my complaint against her and gave her an opportunity to make an offer to avoid going to court i had a barrister friend who was helping me out at this point with advice for free the landlord replied to my letter quite dismissively basically saying that it was clearly just an admin error that caused her to fail to protect my deposit correctly every year for five years lol and accusing me of being motivated by a windfall i replied by email correcting her various mistaken assumptions and repeating the need for her to make an offer in order to avoid court after a while she replied and offered me four thousand pounds i told her that the minimum i would accept was a little over 6.5 000 pounds i forget the exact figure since that was the minimum i would stand to get in court she agreed with certain conditions attached perhaps conditions that she thought i might not be able to fulfill things like sending her copies of all the documentation relating to the deposit for previous year's tenancies but which i was able to do immediately when the money landed in my bank account i emailed her to explain that i would have dropped my complaint against her immediately had she at any point offered a sincere apology which was true at least up until that final email where she insulted me i also said that i hoped she would deal more fairly and reasonably with future tenants she didn't reply i hope that i will never again be a tenant but having spent many years being around by crafty landlords and letting agents it was satisfying to end my renting days with such a satisfying and profitable middle finger i worked at a fortune 500 company for almost a year and a half i want name names but it was a shady company to say the least i started in their quality department but i was literally fired for being too quality for the quality department because i would report sales agents that were forcing crying retirees into making a purchase so they moved me to the business verification department so i could instead make these customers happier with their purchase i'm sorry to say i was far too good at this job as well i got constant kudos from the quality department that i always hit my marks i always verified and corrected information followed procedure to a tee and even took on several extra projects just to help out including preparing and sending gifts out to our higher volume customers on behalf of the sales reps i was always on time i was friendly with everyone and yet i didn't quite fit in as a matter of fact only one person on this new team was someone i could talk to the others were all mid to late 30s with kids and husband slash ex-husbands best way to describe them it's the heathers that grew old and hated it they would constantly bully me i don't mean tease me i mean they would joke about forcing me to work in a broom closet they would report me for cell phone use even though cell phones were allowed just no recording or video calling since we would verify card and address information verbally they would deliberately leave me out of company food orders and celebrations and even convinced the manager not to promote me and instead promoted someone who had been there less time with worse quality only because she fit in better shed literally cost the company money shipping product to the wrong address multiple times and still was promoted within the department they would also berate me for the state of my desk i will say i don't keep a super clean desk but we are not customer facing and it was my organized chaos it wasn't old food or trash just a general scattering of notes and trinkets that never overflowed past my desk the real juice here though was about four months into this position i started documenting all the bullying every instance every word with a date and time and often a reference within the company system for where to locate proof of the bullying all on those little note pads well one day i come back from lunch and they had gone through my desk to clean it going so far as to move my trinkets and pictures around on my desk i took everything home that day but i know they'd actually been after my notebooks thankfully it just had to buy a third one i filled the first two up so it was mostly empty the final straw came on a fateful february afternoon it was a thursday the one co-worker i got along with and i had been texting back and forth mostly craigslist ads for job openings and funny memes to get us through the day because remember phones are allowed she goes to lunch as i'm coming back and i get called into their lawyer's office me and my one and only friend were being given formal write-ups why direct quote your co-workers know you are texting about them and laughing and they don't like it so i was getting a write-up because of an assumption that they had no proof of to begin with and wasn't even remotely true the topper of this was as i exited the right up one of them was facetiming her husband which was against the rules but of course she wasn't even spoken to about it i was done beyond done i put my head down barely worked the rest of the day when i got home i texted my manager and let her know i was using pto and it'd be out friday i spent the whole weekend working on my resignation because i wanted it to be just right you see it been there a year and a half at that point and i knew a few things about how this shady company operates by now i knew on thursday this was going to be my first time ever to quit a job and i wanted to do it upright i wrote in their specific details of the bullying dates times i mentioned i had many more examples documented i wrote how it was known behavior and even condoned by the manager i wrote about the write-up then after many critiques i saved it as a draft i walked in on monday morning 8 a.m on the nose i didn't bother clocking in and it already cleaned out my desk remember i sat down printed two copies of my email and then sent it directly to the ceo i of course dropped a copy off with hr and then walked out not a word to my manager only my one friend knew the plan you see i knew they'd snuff out the fire if i said anything to them about why i quit sweep it under the rug oh well one more person who quit by involving the ceo i eliminated that as an option in 30 minutes their lawyer was calling me for an exit interview they were worried i would sue for a hostile working environment in hindsight i should have but i was more worried about my mental health and monetary compensation i found out from my friend that i had in fact started that fire the whole department was put under review for bullying cell phones were completely banned and the manager and her lackeys last i heard had been demoted i also heard whispers that they dissolved it completely and merged it with the quality team but i'm not positive on that i'm sure it didn't fix everything but i hope they at least keep their hands out of other people's desks from now on what did you think what would you have done differently share your opinions in the comments and if you enjoyed the stories slap that like and subscribe button for more of them and don't forget to support the original writers with an upvote links are in the description peace out and catch you tomorrow

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Views: 2,320

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, top posts, top posts of r/, r/, r/askreddit, reddit top posts, reddit compilation, top posts of all time, ProRevenge, ask reddit, ToadFilms, subreddit, reddit stories, best of r/askreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, best of reddit, ask me anything

Id: zODEUkp3xp0

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020