Opinion | How about treating your client with respect, my (land)lord?
Life can be tough for a small tenant or when you set up a factory in an industrial building
Teasing landlord's operatives is probably disallowed under the Basic Law but, trust me, it's harmless and almost certainly the only form of entertainment you'll get when dealing with these people. The person in question was one of many officious managers working for the owners of a building housing a restaurant in Kowloon my company has just closed.
As a tease I suggested that as we regularly paid his company quite a lot of money, he might like to treat us as customers as opposed to supplicants on the receiving end of instructions.
This is hardly the way this landlord sees things. It is a major property company employing a small army of clipboard-wielding operatives who made a habit of coming into the restaurant and issuing orders about this and that. When they wanted my company to do something, it was expected to be done yesterday, but when a request was made for them to do something, a great deal of time elapsed because of "company policy".
The concept of "customer" clearly bothered the tease-ee; he mulled the word as if it had somehow just entered the vocabulary. "Yes, customer," I said, "we never treat our customers the way you treat us." He thought about this novel idea and then mumbled something about us being tenants.
Well, I can't deny that we were indeed mere tenants, quite like other tenants from small and medium-sized enterprises that account for the bulk of Hong Kong's commercial property rentals.
If you want to use an industrial building for industrial use, you clearly need to be patient
Life being what it is means that being outside the charmed circle of large companies can be tough for corporate tenants. Yet property prices are said to be falling and vacancies in commercial buildings are said to be rising so you might have thought that landlords would be accommodating.