Rant

I won’t mention the name of the estate agents we’ve gone with, but they are named after of an ancient civilisation that once conquered the world. This lot couldn’t conquer an ironing pile belonging to a naturist. If I don’t laugh I’ll probably cry... well ok not cry, I’ll probably attack one of them with the FOR SALE sign they’ve erected in our front garden.If you’ve got something better to do then I suggest you go do it.. otherwise let me begin.

It all started to go wrong the day I went in to sign the contract with them. That morning an invitation arrived in the post, stamp and all, to an open house at the house of my dreams(if I were dreaming of a 2 bedroom house in the catchment for the Walter school that is). I pointed out the error to our guy, telling him he’d wasted a stamp sending it to us when we clearly are not looking for a property of that size or location. And I’m sure the seller would not be happy about them spending their marketing budget in such a manner.
“Oh yes Mrs MacLachlan, you’re on our system as looking for a 4 bedroom house. That was just an error. Not sure how that happened”.

A minor setback.. nothing to worry about....I’ll just sign the contract and turn into a Tasmanian Devil cleaning my house for the next few weeks...

The next week I’m looking frantically for a house that we might want to buy, and more importantly can afford to buy. Unfortunately these two criteria do not happy bedfellows make. A phone message on my house phone from the estate agent who drives a convertible sports car and is far too young, pretty, thin and did I mention young for me to regard her with anything other than contempt, goes something like this..

“Hi Mrs. MacLachlan, it’s the young, pretty, glamorous blond from the agency that makes you reassess your life and look at your love handles and advancing years in a whole new light here (ok I’m paraphrasing). I’m just wondering how your search is going? We’ve got a fantastic property new to the market. Not sure it’s the location you’re looking for. It’s on Manor Road”
Luckily for her she hadn’t got me on the phone, as she was actually trying to sell me my own house. I know people say a good salesman can sell sand to the Arabs, but this was a stretch. However, it did cheer me up to know that she might look a pretty picture, but there’s not much going on behind those mascaraed to within an inch of their lives eyelashes. In fact, her saving grace that she wears so much mascara that it looks like two fat spiders are trying to escape from her eyelids. Otherwise, I’d really have to hate her. In fact I did think later maybe she made the error because she had something in her eye, something like an entire tube of mascara. Anyway, I rang her back and left a message saying I was really excited to hear there was a property we might be interested as I wasn’t having much luck, but since I was currently living in the property I wasn’t interested in buying it at the moment. Surprisingly enough she didn’t ring me back.

THEN yesterday while looking through the free property paper I find our house on there with the open day advertised for tomorrow with the location of the house as BARKHAM.Where the heck is Barkham??? Has there been a huge mudslide overnight and our whole property has slid to a new location? So I rang the office and catch some poor unsuspecting guy at the other end
Me (trying unsuccessfully to disguise my Irish accent “Hello there, I’m just phoning about a property I’ve found in the free property paper. It’s a 3 bedroom in Barkham”
Unsuspecting prepubescent (by the sound of him) boy at the other end (from now on to be known as UPBATOE) “Oh yes madam, just let me find the details of that for you now (pause) Where did you say? Barkham? I’m sorry I can’t actually find that property listed on our system...
Me “Yes I know, the reason you can’t find it is because it’s my house and it’s actually located in Wokingham, NOT Barkham. Where is Barkham?”
UPBATOE -series of excuses and platitudes that I won’t bother repeating that ultimately end in estate agent fashion of blaming someone else..i.e. the newspaper.

Then this morning my friend with the spider swallowing eyes knocks on my door a full 15 minutes early to show someone round to a viewing... causing me to throw various items I was trying to tidy up into my wardrobe upstairs, and open the door to her in a big fat, "I'm older and fatter than you" sweaty panic.

Open house is on tomorrow... it’ll be open season on estate agents if they don’t find someone to buy our house soon!