When I am showing apartments to prospective tenants, I am always on the lookout for abnormal behavior. As my sister says, when a person is trying to get something from you, like a job or an apartment, you have to assume that he is on his ‘best behavior.’ I know what she means. You probably do too. Whenever I am showing an apartment, I always think about this question when an applicant is acting badly – If this person is acting like this when he is on his best behavior, what will he be like after he has moved into my apartment and is no longer on his best behavior?

Feng Shui This Apartment!  I own a couple of apartments near the Rockridge BART station. During a public showing of one of these apartments, one of the prospective tenants attracted my attention and aroused my curiosity because she was holding a compass in her hand and looking at it frequently as she moved from room to room. In each room, she wrote down notes about the room on a pad of paper. When she was finished, she told me that she was interested in renting my apartment, but before she filled out an application form, she wanted to know if I would make a few ‘accommodations’ for her ‘special needs.’ I assumed that she was disabled from the way she was talking because that’s the way disabled people talk, but I was wrong. She was not disabled. She thought the apartment was disabled. I asked her what sort of ‘accommodations’ she wanted. She told me that my apartment had “bad feng shui.” I had heard of feng shui before, but I know nothing about it. She had a list of the things that she felt needed to be fixed. She said: “The front door to this apartment faces north, and the porch is enclosed. That’s bad.” I asked: “Why?” She said: “Well, the porch cover blocks the ‘chi’, so every time you open the front door, you let negative energy into the apartment. I think we can fix this problem with mirrors.” (By this point, I had already made up my mind that I was not going to rent my apartment to this woman, but I didn’t say so.) She continued with her list. She didn’t like the color of the bathroom paint. She said that green is the “worst possible color” for a bathroom. She wanted me to give her permission to repaint the bathroom  “a healthy color like blue.” However, tops on her list of things wrong with my place was the fact that there is no window in the dining alcove. It only gets indirect sunlight. She said that eating food at a table with no direct sunlight is bad feng shui. She wanted me to install a skylight over the dining area so that direct sunlight would fall on the table. That’s an expensive job, and she expected me to pay for it. There were a few other things on her list, but I don’t remember what they were. I had stopped paying attention. I rented the place to somebody else.