For the last eight months I have been trying to sell my house through Main & Main estate agents. I know this isn’t the best time to sell, but needs must. Now, even though the housing market is pretty repressed at the moment, you’d still expect viewings – where the perspective buyers would plead poverty, say they didn’t like the house or just generally waste your time. Yet in those eight months I have had just two viewings.

TWO viewings.

Both of these viewings however, led to offers. This may seem like a very high strike rate, especially when the second viewing actually offered before the viewing. Sadly, both offers turned out to be time-wasters. The first of which waited for a few days before the exchange date to reveal their position of timewasters, costing me several hundred pounds in solicitor’s fees, mortgage fees and search fees on another property.

The second viewing was just a timewaster full stop and he didn’t even seem to know how the whole house buying process worked, making an offer, admitting he didn’t have any money until September and, only then, viewing the house.

Class.

Even the viewing itself was messed up. I stayed home for the viewing, only for nobody to show up. I phoned Main and Main to complain about it and they said they’d look into it. It seems the guy viewing the house had also phoned Main & Main to say he was running late, but Main & Main had no idea what he was on about as they didn’t even know there was a viewing. This despite the fact that they were the ones who arranged it!

Martin Main no less phoned me to ask if I had a viewing at 11:30. He’s asking me? I informed him that no, I hadn’t, it was 11:00am. He informed me that the chap was running late.

What a disorganised way to run an estate agents.

With this second viewing proving a complete waste of time, I had to make the executive decision to put my house up for rent. I decided to use Bridgfords for this because, even though they’re more expensive, they seemed more professional. Sure enough, within a week of Bridgfords listing my property for rent they have arranged five viewings. Not bad. Every viewing they arrange results in me getting a text message conforming the details, and the time and date of the viewing. Main & Main take note.

Now, the fun part comes in Main & Main throwing their hat into the ring for lettings too. They said that I should let them put the house up for rent exclusively for a month and, if they didn’t let it by then, I could use another agent as well. I had no intention of doing this as they’d been fairly useless up until this point; still, I thought I’d use them ‘as well’ as it couldn’t hurt. They said if I dropped the signed terms and conditions into them they’d have the property online for rent within 20 minutes.

Sounds good eh? I dropped the signed Ts&Cs in on Saturday May 14th, where the woman in the office put down her sandwich long enough to say they’d ‘fax it over to the correct office for Monday morning’… hardly 20 minutes.

Then, Monday came and went and still no house for rent online. I checked again Thursday, some FIVE days after I’d handed over the signed Ts&Cs and still there was no property online. At this point Bridgfords were preparing for their third and fourth viewings simultaneously.

Now, Saturday, a full week later I have heard from Main & Main. They have put the house up for rent and in just seven days. God made the heavens and the earth in that time (if you believe that tosh) yet Main & Main can only manage to list a house on a website.

I’m so glad I didn’t use them exclusively. Main and Main over promised and under delivered on their services, taking a week to do what they said would be done in 20 minutes. In that time Bridgfords has arranged five viewings. You get what you pay for I guess.

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Sometimes Microsoft just sets out to piss me off; I know it. Whether it’s changing the way basic functions work from one version of Outlook to the next, or producing incredibly unhelpful error messages that border on the python-esque.

This latest attempt by Microsoft to rupture my spleen was sparked by my old foe, Microsoft Outlook. This useless attempt at an email program managed to error when trying to send an email, offering the pointless message of ‘cannot send this item’. As if this pitiful attempt at an apology weren’t enough, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, thought they’d garner some feedback for their endeavours to anger me by further annoying me with the question ‘was this information helpful?’.

Are they deliberately trying to piss me off? ‘Cannot send this item’… ‘was this information helpful?’ – oh yeah, well useful. It’ll come in handy when I have to send another email and know that the reason it hasn’t sent is because it could not send. Thanks Microsoft, you retarded bunch of morons. I now know you’re the ‘go to’ guys for pointless fekking error messages.

Incidentally, if anyone from Microsoft is reading this and they are having trouble understanding sarcasm: no, that error message was not helpful. Did you really think it was when you dreamt it up while trying to evade another bollocking from Bill Gates for the latest cock up within your bug ridden software?

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I’m not usually one to complain, as regular readers will know, but there’s just something that irks me about a product that you receive compared with the picture. This could be anything, whether it’s something from a catalogue that looks decidedly better quality than it does in real life, or in a fast food establishment where the images of the food look much better than the reality.

Yes, I do realise this is a bit of a ‘Falling Down’ complaint as already expressed by Michael Douglas, but this week it did annoy me; not because the food supplied never look like the pictures (because on the whole in Subway, they do) no, this is because this particular sub was a ragged affair as a direct result of the people serving not really giving a monkey’s.

First off, where this rather excellent food photography suggests a packed sandwich with thick bread, my sub was cut, it would appear, by a blind Samurai. The bottom part of the sub was very thick, while the top part was wafer thin. Surely they should have thrown those pieces and started again? But no, they carried on regardless – and weren’t really paying attention either. Despite me telling two different people a total of three times that I didn’t want it toasted, I narrowly managed to save the sub from the fires of the oven – communication wasn’t high on their list of skills.

As the top of the sub was so thin (almost transparent in places) it naturally started to fall apart when picked up too – and didn’t look anything like this picture of a Subway BMT.

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I was rather abruptly awoken this morning by the phone ringing (a very loud phone at that) which caused me to jump up believing I’d overslept and was late for work. I was sure I’d answer the phone and be questioned about my tardiness.

But no. When I picked up the phone I heard a beep, before a recorded voice stated something along the lines of:

“Hello. You recently contacted Virgin Media to make a complaint. We would like you to give feedback about…”

I hung up. I was not late for work. I had not overslept. My alarm was not due to sound for another 30 minutes.

So Virgin Media (NTL in disguise), you want feedback do you? Here’s some feedback; don’t call me early in the morning, with a recorded message, asking for feedback on a previous complaint. It might, and say might, not have been quite so bad had the call been from a real live human being, as opposed to a pre-recorded track played down the phone. However it wasn’t. You woke me, with no thought for how it would impact on my day, and you couldn’t even be arsed to have one of your own staff do it – you instead had a soulless machine do it for you, while you lay in bed dreaming of profits.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with your infernal robotic voices when we call you for assistance, trying in vain to get our TV to show on-demand at peak times, only to be placed on hold for Christ knows how long. Now you have your damn recorded messages calling us at all sodding hours of the day to extract some form of automated revenge on customers who have shown the audacity to make a complaint in the first place.

Virgin Media! You have the impertinence to call me with a robotic sounding message in the small hours of the day! You have started a war you cannot win sirs, I assure you of this!

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