Ahh, the joys of moving. Shame about the estate agent.

This week, I have mostly been moving. It's a little overrated, in my opinion. I'd forgotten how frustrating it is dragging stuff up stairs that you've had to disassemble, followed by being totally baffled at the procedure of putting it back together again. There's also the factor of "settling in", which is a cosy euphemism for living out of your bags for a couple of days, not having a clue where anything is, not knowing how to turn the hot water on and forgetting that you had to turn the fridge on, so you have no snacky food to make you feel better. You'd have a cup of tea, but the kettle is in a box. Somewhere. Also, why is it that new homes have that strange smell? You know, that smell that you only get when you go into someone else's house, that leaves you wondering what your own "house-smell" smells like to others?



I digress. Anyway, despite lots of bedding/wardrobes/chairs/other irritatingly bulky furniture needing to be dragged in, the one thing that really drove me crazy was the damn washing machine! Did you know they put a cement block in those things? Well I do now, having had to drag it up a flight of stairs. We had to resort to "rolling" it up the stairs, as this was the only alternative to hiring Mexican day-labourers. So we finally got it to the top of the stairs, ready to heave into place, when we decided to do the itinerary. While checking off the list, we came to an interesting category: "Utility Room". What!! Yes, the estate agent lady who came round (who was truly useless at all things estate agenty) didn't think to mention this little fact to us. T'would have been nice not to have heaved an elephant of a machine up the stairs, only to have it taken back down again. I can remember when we were being shown around the different new abodes, how she didn't do anything that you could vaguely interpret as "selling", other than forgetting the door entry code for one place, nearly hitting a car, getting hopelessly lost, nearly crashing, then turning around in defeat when she came across roadworks five minutes walk away from the last place. I suggested maybe walking, and this was met with a suggestion that she had other clients to show around. What, like us? To be honest, if the place we chose wasn't so nice, we would have not bothered with any of them out of principle.

So why was she such a grump, to the point that she phoned the office to tell them (in front of us) that she was having an awful day? Was she just having a one-off? Maybe, but I don't know that, and I don't really care. What I do care about (and what the estate agents SHOULD care about) is that I was genuinely inclined to refuse all their properties based on no other factor than her. Sure, the agency could have spent a fortune on fancy offices, new cars to get to the properties, all kinds of marketing etc, and it would have all gone to waste had it not been for the new place being so nice, something the agency has no control over.

So what should the agency do? Are they even aware of her performance? Well, quite simply they need to make sure that their staff are doing exactly as they should be doing. The fact that she felt it OK to call the office and declare that she was having an awful day, and to suggest that she would have to cancel OUR viewing in favour of SOMEONE ELSE due to HER problem tells me that the management are not aware of this, or are not getting sufficient information on the conduct of their reps. If all was well, then she would have not felt it reasonable to do this. Trouble is, this will earn the business a bad reputation, and we are all aware as to how difficult a bad reputation is to shift.

So make sure you know exactly how your front-line staff present themselves. Otherwise, a problem will inevitably arise that you may not be able to wipe off. Mud sticks, remember.

Now, back to the important stuff. where's that damn screw for this Ikea unit? Anyone seen it.....

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