He slept on the couch for five nights rather than tell me the mattress was wrong

We manage nine furnished units for two employers and a relocation firm, and the one I think about was a four-week placement that turned into a complaint I never got.

Project team of four came in on a Sunday. Three of them went into a two-bedroom we've had running for years and the fourth went into a one-bedroom we'd just brought online, first guest, everything new including the bed. He checked in, signed nothing because the company signs everything, and I heard nothing from him for two weeks.

On the second cleaning visit our housekeeper texted me a photo of the couch. Cushions crushed flat on one end, a pillow and a folded blanket on the arm, and the bed in the bedroom made up exactly the way she'd left it the visit before. She'd noticed the same thing the first visit and figured he was working late on the couch.

I called him. He was polite about it, which was worse. The mattress was a firm one we'd bought because the last three sets of guests in the other unit had asked for firm, and this guy had a back that could not do it. Five nights on the couch, then he started sleeping on top of the comforter on the floor because the couch was worse. He did not call because the invoice goes to his employer and he did not want to be the guy who complained about a bed his company was paying for.

We had a replacement mattress in that apartment in about thirty hours. Cost us $640 and a Saturday. He extended twice and finished out about nine weeks, and when the relocation coordinator did her review she wrote one line about us: they call the guest, the guest does not have to call them.

Since then we ask on day two. Not an email survey, an actual phone call, two questions, is the bed working and is the internet working. Roughly one in five gives us something. The rest of the time it's fine and it takes ninety seconds.

The thing that stays with me is that he would have gone home after four weeks, told his coworkers the apartment was rough, and I would never have learned a single thing about why the next placement went somewhere else.