We’ve all heard of the “landlord special.”

It’s when a property owner doesn’t want to cut into their profit margin by hiring a professional painter to repaint the apartment after a tenant leaves.

Instead, the landlord busts out a brush, or hires the lowest bidder, with predictable results: everything on the wall gets painted over, including in some cases actual insects.

One we saw this week might take the cake though.

In Minnesota, a tenant who goes by the reddit handle “Fearless_Ad8943” posted a photo of their brand-new air conditioner which unfortunately had a fresh coat of maroon paint to match the house.

“I just moved into an apartment about two months ago,” Fearless_Ad8943 wrote. “Monday we get a notice they are repainting the building, which is perfectly fine as we did have a 24 hour notice. What they did NOT include is that they are spray painting over the AIR CONDITIONERS, which by the way, did not come with the apartment.”

Because the paint got into the coils, the A/C unit has been rendered inoperable, and useless except as a piece of modern art. That means the tenant will have to shell out another $300 to buy the air conditioner again.

“No professional painter would spray into a unit like that, that’s ridiculous,” wrote redditor HeyRainy.

“This is what happens when your landlord takes the cheapest bidder,” said another redditor.

Granted, the landlord had told tenants to “keep windows closed all week,” so perhaps felt entitled to blindly spray paint over anything exposed to outside air within shooting distance.

The redditor said they didn’t understand that “close the windows” meant to remove the air conditioner or it would be sprayed to oblivion.

The weird thing is that a lot of the rest of the jobsite looks relatively unscathed. There’s no overspray on the bricks beneath the A/C, and the windows next to it are likewise untouched.

What would you do if your team arrived at an apartment building that had an air conditioner in the window?