Cupboard Tactic

A long-standing and much-favored device of landlords, the cupboard tactic has been skillfully and effectively utilized to distract, divert, and disorientate tenants from most minor troubles they seem to insist they have, but that the landlord does not recognize for various reasons—most of them pertaining to the fact that he or she is a cheap bastard.

The idea behind the tactic is quite simple: the landlord tells the occupants that, whatever their problem, to fix it they must remove all the items from their cupboards. This seemingly innocuous request has a two pronged effect: first, the tenants become reluctant because they don't want to have to take out all the odd things they shoved in the cupboard in the mad rush to clean up before having a date over; and second, it focuses the tenants' attention on the various odd things that they have in those cupboards and that they'd rather people not see—thus diverting their attention from what the landlord would call "their time-consuming, money-grubbing hallucinations".

Hence, in most cases, the tenants—embarrassed by their cupboard paraphernalia and daunted by the task of having to look at it (let alone move it around)—spontaneously become enraged at the landlord for making such a ludicrous request and storm off exclaiming how they'll never do such a ridiculous thing.

Occasionally, however, the landlord is met with a tenant who calls the bluff and agrees to remove all the internals of the cupboards. When this happens, the response of the landlord is simple: arrange a time for the cupboards to be cleaned out that is terribly inconvenient to the tenant and will ensure that there is no conceivable way the tenant could be around. Once the tenant has left, the landlord can enter the apartment, look through the piles of cupboard mess and reconsider renewing their lease, eat some left-over pie, and finally exit without having done a single thing.

When the tenant returns, they usually notice that nothing has been done and call the landlord. Here a sufficiently clever landlord would not answer the phone, but that particular trait is absent in a surprisingly large number of them. So, upon being questioned as to why there is no trace that anything was fixed, the landlord is left with little alternative but to explain, "because, there was no possible way to fix the problem seeing as there were piles and piles of stuff in the way. You know that crap really belongs in a cupboard."