I managed service vendors across three residential properties.
Maintenance schedules.
Staff access.
Guest protocols.
Training.
Complaints.
I made mistakes.
Once I scheduled an elevator inspection during a resident event and created forty-five minutes of chaos.
I expected Alessandro to rescue the situation.
He did not.
Good.
My director made me fix it.
Also good.
I apologized to the building manager.
Rescheduled service.
Updated planning procedures.
Learned.
Failure stopped feeling like a cliff.
That may have been the biggest change of all.
When you live one paycheck from disaster, every mistake feels fatal.
Stability gave me room to be imperfect.
I had not known how much fear lived inside competence.
Carlo became unexpectedly important in my new role.
Not as mentor exactly.
Maybe reluctant uncle.
He taught me mechanical systems.
Boiler schedules.
Vendor negotiations.
How to tell when a contractor added a “Manhattan premium” to an estimate because they assumed nobody
