Matthew's Journal

You may recall that when I got back from Daniel's wedding, we discovered that our washer-drier was broken. atreic phoned Russells, who sent someone round, who frobbed it a bit, and decided that the central control unit was buggered. That's probably going to cost as much as the ancient machine is worth, so he said he'd phone Russells.

atreic chased Russells up at the end of last week, to be told they'd tried to get hold of the landlady and failed, but had got hold of her mother(!) who said she'd try to get hold of the landlord.

Today atreic chased them again, to be told that the landlord apparantly has an appliance repair contract (which they knew nothing about, despite managing the property for the past 3 years), and is annoyed that Russells had sent someone to look at the machine. They gave atreic the details of this policy, and suggested she call them to arrange for someone to come round and do something useful. So, atreiccalls them. They ask her a series of questions she couldn't answer "how old is the machine?", "When does the policy expire?"[1], and so on, and then say they can't help without answers to these.

So, atreicthen has to call Russells back and explain this mess. They've now got to shout at the landlord to give them enough information so they can actually get the appliance people to send someone out to look at the machine, at which point we'll have reached stage 1 of the process, again. Over a week after the fucking thing broke.

Inserting a random fourth party into the already-over-beurocratic process of house-renting is just fucking crap, especially if you don't tell anyone you're doing it! And these people will presumably want to waste lots of time, in order to try and avoid paying out.

atreic has been a star at hassling people about all this, when she really has better things to do with her life.

Err, so if you live near us, we may come and ask nicely to borrow your washing machine :(

[1]err, WTF? surely they should know this? muppets!