Avoid any Pan Am owned building, unless you want to remain a prisoner, there, forever.
Our family has spent the past year in a Pan Am owned building.
We now have to relocate out of NYC for work and simply getting a representative of Pan Am on the phone to get permission to work with realtors to find someone for our unit was nearly impossible--an endless parade of direct to voice mail calls, employees who never seem to be in the office, an aloof receptionist with the apparent qualifications of a middle school drop out who abuses horse tranquilizers or something along those lines.
Once we finally got someone on the phone (after weeks of trying--no, really, WEEKS of unanswered phone calls), the first person was a very angry woman with a dubious grasp of the English language. She then transferred us to a man whose communication style can only be described as "yelling over everyone in the immediate zip code."
I had to repeatedly yell just to inform him of my reason for calling.
After several minutes of us trying to talk over each other:
HIM: "Let me tell you, I'll tell you! I'm telling you!"
Me: "Let me at least explain why I'm calling! You can't answer my questions, if you don't know why I'm calling!"
*No, really, that happened. But I digress*
I managed to eventually inform him that we needed to relocate and would be ever so happy to work with the realtors they designated as, I don't even know what you'd call it, realtors with keys to the gates, maybe, or agents who won't be shot on sight for attempting to show a listing or whatever--apparently, only specific agents can show vacant units in our building, but that's not important.
So, I managed to inform Officer Friendly with Pan Am that we would like to let the real estate agents show our place or whatever we needed to do to get the ball rolling--you know, because we had a job that'd be thousands of miles away, now, and while we love our place, it'd be a heck of a commute to try to make that work through the end of April.
At that point I basically let the volume-challenged gentleman have his say, so he could inform me that real estate agents absolutely could not show the place until after we'd vacated and that we couldn't find anyone, ourselves, and we would ALSO be responsible for any remaining rent for the remainder of our lease.
After more yelling over each other (not even angry, just volume competition, really--like he missed the day in school when the teachers taught kids about how conversations work).
"Okay, Timmy, you speak. Now, Timmy, Jane speaks. And that's a conversation, class"
So, anyhow, I asked, "Well, you have no incentive to rent the thing, then, if you're going to hold us liable AND not allow us to even begin to work with a realtor."
He then, having dizzyingly, almost impressively missed the point of what I'd said in every conceivable way, replied that, "We manage THOUSANDS of buildings, I don't have time to worry about every single unit that becomes vacant."
And I was kind of like, "Well, yeah, that's basically exactly what I just said."
And then he contradictorily said, "Empty units actually HURT our business! So we do calculations of how many units will be available months in advance," or something.
At that point I knew that few things in existence could compete with this conversation for least productive use of energy, ever, in the history of everything.
I mean, every ounce of sweat and thought that went into constructing the Maginot Line takes on an incomprehensible brilliance compared with the utterance of another syllable to this person, I realized.
Essentially, what I'm left with is this: We are liable for the remainder of our lease (I get that); we CANNOT find anyone to take over our lease without being transferred to Guantanamo Bay and shot like dogs in an empty tennis court; we CANNOT speak with any real estate agents about finding someone who may be interested in moving into our vacant unit, ever, under any conceivable circumstance; we cannot relocate to our new place without continuing to pay rent, here (yes, I get that), as well; we cannot even hypothesize that someone may be interested in our unit after we've vacated.
Essentially, we are being held prisoner by Pan Am for the remainder of our lease and if we attempt to leave, we can only take the word of a genuinely contemptible person that they will make the slightest attempt to find anyone to fill the unit once we've vacated, which may or may not be true (I mean, who's to say, right? Maybe it takes them seven weeks to paint the entry *wink*).
It's truly a shame that the employees of Pan Am can't put HALF the effort into making their company appear to, uh, not look like the ascension of the dark lord Satan that they put into what they have for lunch read more
