It was the weekend. Nobody was coming out.
A resident called with a backed-up sink and a disposal that wouldn’t work. For most after-hours maintenance lines, that call ends with a work order and a promise that someone will be by Monday. For Happy Force Technician, Corey Zydonyk, it was a puzzle worth solving right now.
He talked the resident through resetting the disposal first. When that didn’t fully clear it — the unit was still humming, still jammed — Corey asked a simple question: do you have an allen wrench? The resident did. And a few minutes later, working from Corey’s instructions, he’d unjammed the disposal himself, from underneath the sink, on a weekend, without a single truck rolling.
That call is a good window into how Corey thinks about maintenance. Not as a set of tickets to be processed, but as a set of problems to be solved — for real people, in real time, with whatever tools are available.
Containment First. Escalation Fast.
Not every call Corey takes ends with a remote resolution. Some situations — a ceiling leak with water hitting the floor, a bubble forming above a toilet — aren’t problems you troubleshoot over the phone. They’re problems you contain, then escalate.
Corey has a clear protocol for those moments. Verify the resident’s information. Identify exactly where the issue is happening. Ask what they can do right now to stop the damage from spreading — a shut-off valve under the sink, a small container catching water from the ceiling. Then escalate immediately to on-site staff, and give the resident a clear expectation: if nobody calls you within the hour, call us back and we’ll re-escalate.
That last part matters more than it might seem. A resident dealing with a leak at 11 p.m. is already anxious. Giving them a concrete next step — a specific timeframe, a clear action they can take if things stall — transforms that anxiety into something manageable. They’re not waiting in the dark. They know exactly what happens next.
“Until the on-site staff can get there, no property damages are happening. That’s the goal on every escalation: hand off a situation that’s contained, not one that’s gotten worse while the call was being processed.”
— Corey Zydonyk | Happy Force Technician, HappyCo
The Community Side of Maintenance
What Corey talks about with the most energy, though, isn’t the technical dimension of the work — it’s the resident side. He came into the role expecting to fix things. What he didn’t expect was how much the human element would shape the experience.
Multifamily maintenance isn’t like commercial work. The person on the other end of the request isn’t a facilities manager with a service contract. It’s someone at home, in their living space, dealing with something that’s disrupted their day or their night. The stakes feel different. The response matters differently.
Corey noticed that early on — the way a quick, competent response could completely shift a resident’s experience. The calls that start tense and end with genuine relief. The situations that could have escalated into complaints or bad reviews, resolved instead into something that actually builds resident loyalty.
That’s not an accidental outcome. It’s what happens when you staff a remote maintenance line with people who actually care.
Why He Does This Work
Corey doesn’t dress up his motivation.
“I love helping people. That’s why I do maintenance. That’s why I got into it.”
It’s a simple answer, but it explains a lot about how he approaches the job. The disposal fix on a weekend afternoon. The leak call where he stays on the line to make sure the resident knows what to do. The extra question about the allen wrench that turns a work order into a resolved problem.
Those aren’t the actions of someone moving through a queue. They’re the actions of someone who came to maintenance because they genuinely like fixing things for people — and who found in Happy Force a role that lets them do exactly that, at a scale they never could have reached in the field.
“Being able to help somebody solve an issue, or at least get them help — just being able to be a part of that — is the biggest reward of the job.”
It shows in every call he takes.
Lauren Seagren is the Content Marketing Specialist at HappyCo, where she leads the company’s content strategy and storytelling across channels. She develops and optimizes campaigns, blogs, case studies, and enablement materials, while building the systems that help content scale and align across teams. Prior to HappyCo, Lauren led content and brand strategy across SaaS startups, creative agencies, and growth-stage companies, bringing more than a decade of experience driving measurable growth across B2B and B2C organizations.
