Matthew's Journal

So, following on from the last entry on the subject, Russells emailed atreic with more details of the appliance insurance. atreic 'phoned them up, and they said they'd send someone round today between 8 and 6. She pointed out this was utterly unreasonable, as we both have jobs and can't just sit at home all day, so it was agreed that the engineer would call atreic's mobile an hour before he was going to turn up.

At about eleven this morning, the phone went at home. It was the landlord's mother(!), who was confused as to why the engineer has just phoned her up. I explained what was going on, and told her to tell them to call atreic's mobile, as we'd told them once already. I gave her atreic's mobile number for this purpose. Shortly afterwards, the landlord's mother phone's atreic to tell her all of this. atreic then phones him and gives him her number (which he has already, suprise, suprise). Mid-afternoon, she's not heard anything, so calls him, but fails to get any useful reception, and then is cut off, only to get answerphone thereafter. atreic then calls the call center to be told that the engineer has recorded a "I called, but they were out", and that they can't send us anyone again until the 20th, well over a fortnight after the dratted thing failed in the first place. To cap it all, our "Property Manager" at Russells is on holiday until Monday.

I am furious. I am utterly sick and tired of being fucked around by these useless muppets. Tommorow morning, Russells are going to get an exceedingly stroppy email from me demanding Something Be Done. It's not my fault if they didn't know about the stupid appliance insurers, it's not my fault if said insurers can't pass on instructions to their engineers, and I'm sick of not having a working washing machine. I'm meant to be renting a furnished property, for crying out loud!

[Edited in light of atreic's comment

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!