Personality conflicts with tenants and maintenance

[Steven Westlake]

OK, so I’m having some personality conflict between one of my tenants and the maintenance man. The maintenance man is also a tenant, but in a different building in a different town. These 2 buildings are approximately 12 miles apart.

I’m open to suggestions for your help.

My maintenance guy is the son of one of my tenants. his mother lives upstairs from the tenant whom the conflict has occurred with. His mother may have been dating this tenant. Drinking may have been involved on either side or both sides.

the maintenance guy does visit his mother there pretty regularly, and tends to combine these two tasks into a single trip.

He went there to flush water heaters, and repair another water heater. The repair was a different tenant than his mother or conflict guy. So i said might as well flush all the water heaters while your there. Thats seems to have been where it started, conflict guy did not want his water heater flushed, so he called me, I explained that it cleaned out the sediment and allowed his water heater to work better and last longer. So he agreed to get his flushed, pretty certain he has no say in the maintenance of my building, but it seemed easier to explain why, than to draw a line in the sand.

Was this fight my fault? I’m horrible at reading people, 35 plus years in engineering and computer programming, leaves me always going directly to logic and reasoning without emotion.