I am a student who has just moved into a house with four other people. I have a few remarks about our current housing situation, to wit:
Our house is a fucking shit hole piece of shit run by a bunch of crooks masquerading as Letting Agents representing an even bigger bunch of crooks masquerading as landlords. Our wonderful and benevolent housing providers have so far fucked up in the following ways:
They did NOT properly fix the damp in the kitchen ceiling. What they did instead was get a troupe of monkeys in, taught them how to paint and left them to their own devices. The result is that the kitchen ceiling is being eaten away before our very eyes and the damp is now showing through the ceiling more conspicuously than it ever did as it rots through the extra layer of paint these cowboys laid on. They promised the damp would be fixed (as in its root cause located and repaired) before we moved in. It is a condition of our residency.
They did NOT fix the heating. Consequently the house felt like a meat locker for the first week after we moved in. They fixed it a week later and now my testicles have finally descended again where before they were steadfastly lodged in my lower abdomen to keep warm. Again, they promised to fix this before we moved in. It is a condition of our residency.
The fridge and freezer, which they said they would sort out, have been bust since we moved in. Don’t get me wrong, they work well enough to be used but it’s just a pain in the ass that the freezer is not quite cold enough to make ice and the fridge is cold enough to almost make ice. That means that frozen goods go off quickly while goods which are simply meant to be refrigerated get too cold and go all frosty. Not a big gripe but a gripe nonetheless.
They did NOT adequately ensure that our gas supply was safe. On 03/11/03 (or 11/03/03 for you Americans) at about one 'o Clock in the morning one of my house mates noticed that our kitchen stank of gas, quickly located the leak and called an emergency technician to fix it. When the technician came around he noticed several problems, any one of which (so he said) could form solid grounds for a lawsuit, and all of which seem to have been overlooked when our Landlord allegedly had the gas system inspected three months ago. We do have a certificate to prove that it had been checked at the appropriate time (which was three months ago at this time of writing) but the existence of problems such as the gas flue being slap bang next to the front door (when, by law it should be at least two meters away), is enough to make me think that the people who “inspected” our gas setup were clueless fucking morons with potato batteries for brains. Besides, boilers just don’t go from being in perfect working order to deathtrap status in 3 months. I suspect that there were problems before but they either ignored them or didn’t spot them.
If my house mate had not noticed the gas leak the likelihood is that we’d all be lined up in a morgue due to Carbon Monoxide poisoning. We’re understandably pissed off. Needless to say, it is a condition of our residency that our gas system not fucking kill us.
They have NOT given us a full tenancy agreement. I was responsible for collecting the tenancy agreement from them and when they handed me a four page document and told me it was the tenancy agreement I naively believed them. At this point I was unaware of what bloodsucking little shyster bastards they were and, having never rented a property before, didn’t know any better. The full tenancy agreement is forty fucking pages long!. They are now lying and weaseling to the point that they’re talking themselves into concentric circles and gradually disappearing up their own assholes by stating flat out that the forty page wodge of legalistic bullshit which outlines our FULL rights and privileges was already given to me when I collected the aforementioned 4 page précis’ed version. Not so.
Since they are sticking to their story that they already gave me a copy of the FULL agreement they have the fucking temerity to try and charge us 25 quid for a photocopy. Now, I know you have to be some special kind of bastard to become a Letting Agent but that’s low even for them. Maybe in the fucking bizarro world of their own imaginings their time IS worth £300.00 an hour (given that photocopying the document is like 5 minutes pure hard graft) but down here on this homely little place I like to call Planet Earth it is not. They are purposefully keeping us ignorant so that we won’t cotton on to the fact that they have the personal integrity of a paedophile working as a playground monitor. In fact, I’d personally put more trust in the paedophile who, while he may try to fuck your children, at least won’t look you in the eye and insist with a straight face that such inconsequentialities as tenancy agreements, damp-rotted ceilings and gas pipes with an unfortunate tendency to spew forth lethal amounts of Carbon Monoxide in the wee small hours aren’t their responsibility.
They are vile, obnoxious and never return our phone calls so we always have to do the leg work and chase them to do their jobs. This evasive tactic on their part has forced us to call them so many times that I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve got their phones rigged up to their prostate glands. One of my other house mates is actually getting ill from the stress of dealing with their shit all the time.
The name of this Letting Agency? It doesn’t fucking matter. They’re a local agency and not part of a chain so unless you live in my area you’ll never have to deal with them. If you have dealt with them, chances are you know exactly who I’m talking about. The particulars of our landlord? I don’t fucking know. Our Letting Agents won’t tell us. Apparently they don’t have the right to hand out this information which is a bit of a pain in the arse because it means that we have to go through our letting agents to speak to the landlord. Instead of just giving us his phone number so we can talk to him directly whenever it’s necessary, we have to phone our Letting Agents who then phone the Landlord who then phones us, provided that he feels like it. Since I don’t trust our Letting Agents or the Landlord as far as I can spit and don’t even trust them to keep us alive, I have no confidence that they will ever get around to forwarding/returning our calls any time before the heat death of the Universe.
They are also incredibly fucking rude. For example, one of my house mate asked a person in our Letting Agent’s office to let us know when they had found someone to fix the damp and was told “I don’t work for MacDonalds, you know. I can’t do everything at once”.
Suffice to say that if I had been on the receiving end of that shit I would have had to urgently inquire as to who, precisely, he thought he was fucking talking to. My house mate, however, is not so confrontational and not only let him off the hook but didn’t get his name so unfortunately I can’t get him fired.
However, I have made it my mission in life to hunt him down, rip off his head and tear out his fucking soul. As I count down the hours before something else goes wrong (which, if recent events are anything to go by, should be any minute now) that thought is quite a consolation.
Note: I’m English and any references to legal matters refer to English law, not US law.
