“I’m Lucky.” I once got an application for an apartment in Berkeley from a young single woman. On her application form, she said that she was a self-employed ‘holistic therapist.’ That’s one of those job titles can mean anything. She claimed to have a good income, but her income was completely verifiable. She said that most of her customers paid her in cash and that she didn’t file tax returns. I told her that unverifiable income doesn’t carry a lot of weight with landlords when reviewing rental applications. She said that she knew that; however, she kept saying: “You really should to rent this apartment to me” and she said it in a sly way as though there was some special reason that I should know about, but didn’t. After a while, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her: “Why do you keep saying that?” She said: “Because I’m lucky, and if you rent this apartment to me, you will be lucky too. I bring good luck to landlords.” I asked her what she meant by that. She said: “Just a few days after I moved into my last apartment, my landlord’s mother was run over by a delivery truck and killed. He inherited a fortune. His mother had a lot more money than he thought she did.” I concluded that the point of this woman’s story was that she is lucky for landlords – – but not their mothers. I decided to take my chances of getting an unlucky tenant and rented my apartment to somebody else. As it turned out, the tenant I rented my apartment to actually was unlucky! He was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley. A short while after he moved in, he broke a leg on a ski trip. He had a lot of difficulty getting to campus for several months while his leg was in a cast, and it was during the rainy season too.
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