Seeing it's
HaLlOwE'eN, please forgive a repost from four years ago. I wrote this to humour Mrs. Tea after she had a particularly bad experience with some bloodletting agents.
Self Storage
(with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe)
I’d had enough. Well, I’d decided I’d had enough six months ago, actually. Then about two months ago I’d said to myself that that really was it, I mean the final, actual
it. Two weeks ago something eventually snapped, and yesterday it snapped again, louder. That whining, nasal, orange-faced cunt had become the bane of my life and she was going to get it –
hard.
The house had looked lovely at the time and, despite the still-untreated damp in the master bedroom and the collapsed garden fence that had never been mended, I suppose it was still ultimately a nice property. That must be why I had persevered with it – well, that and the fact that I’d signed a contract effectively forfeiting my soul should I try to leave before the end of a year. ‘Character Victorian property, 4 bed’ the ad had said, with that gleeful noun-abuse so beloved of letting agents. But it was characterful, with that reassuring solidity common to nineteenth-century town houses all over the city. It was on a leafy street in Chalk Farm, five minutes’ walk from the tube station, towards the upper end of my budget range but not so far into the posh end of the neighbourhood as to be unaffordable. Jane, Tim and Tariq had all been enthusiastic, and it had been decided that as Master’s students we were entitled to a bit of luxury after three years of undergraduate semi-squalor.
The letting agency had seemed reasonable at the time, although even then there had been something about Janice Sneed that had got my back up a bit. Maybe it was the not-quite-convincing fake tan that ended an inch or so above the collar of her shirt; maybe it was the sing-song, nasal intonation or the ingratiatingly insincere smile; maybe it was her insistence on hypercorrecting pronouns in the belief that it made her sound erudite. Probably it was all these things. But all this had seemed immaterial since the house was going for what appeared to be a reasonable price and, with term starting soon, we gathered in the agency’s office on Camden High Street and signed the fateful contract. “Yourselves will receive countersigned copies in a few days”, herself had twanged at us as we left, rather put out by the £100 ‘signing fee’ that had allegedly been mentioned before (none of us had any recollection of it) but nonetheless happily preoccupied by thoughts of moving into our new home. Perhaps the agency’s name – ‘Happy Homez’ – should have rung alarm bells before we even walked inside. But all that’s academic now.
And for a few months everything had gone swimmingly. We had an enjoyable housewarming party, did some minor decorating, found a decent enough nearby pub that became the established local. All that sort of stuff. Anyway, it was fine. Then Tim noticed a small dark patch in the ceiling corner of his room, which appeared after a night of heavy rain in November and gradually grew as the winter wore on. Three emails to the agency later – initially polite, then polite but insistent and finally insistent – they’d eventually sent round a goon in overalls who’d glanced at it for a moment, grunted and then driven off. The following day Tim had received an email informing him that since the damp had been there when we’d moved in, there was nothing they “could” (by which I think they meant “should”) do about it. Further emails, phone calls and eventually a personal visit to the office had resulted in a different goon coming over and simply painting over the damp. None of us was exactly an expert on home improvements but it was obvious that this was not going to fix the problem.
Various other gripes were dealt with ineptly or simply ignored, but what really started to grate was the correspondence. Emails about a subject one of us had brought up would often be addressed to one of the others, and the content of these emails sounded like it had been written by someone who’d heard of the idea of ‘office English’ and thought they’d give it a bash. Phrases like “
as per the last correspondence from yourselves” and “
with reference to the term’s and condition’s hereby set forth in you’re contract’s” are indelibly burnt into my brain.
But that was just the start. Things went from bad to worse when Tim decided to move out after being offered a placement in the States. We knew we were jointly liable for the rent of course, but had assumed it wouldn’t be a problem since Tim’s friend Alex wanted to move straight in and replace him, so the room wouldn’t be standing empty. What could be simpler than printing off a new contract with Alex’s name in place of Tim’s, with a start date one day later than the day Tim left?
Oh, no. Oh no, no, no, no. It is
not that simple, Happy Homez told us dolefully, as if
they were the ones who were going to have to pay big to sort out this apparently all-but-intractable problem. All our names were printed on the contract, we had to understand. This was why the re-signing fee – which none of us had remembered being mentioned in the original discussion of terms, funnily enough – would apply four times over, to the three of us who were remaining as well as to Alex. Tim was caught too, with a hefty early-termination fee. When we pointed out that none of these fees were mentioned in our contracts, Happy Homez helpfully responded that these were
additional fees, which we could view at our leisure on their website, and that by signing the contract we’d implicitly implied that we’d read and agreed to those conditions. These weren’t so much letting agents as blood-letting agents, I decided grimly.
This was the final straw. Alex and the rest of us eventually paid up, upon threat of legal action, and we simply decided to sit tight and wait out the remaining few months of the contract. We’d given all reasonable notice about reclaiming our substantial deposits and on top of that had come yet more demands for fees for the privilege of living in a house we were all fleeing at the earliest feasible opportunity.
So that was it. I was moving out,
finally free of this house of administrational horrors. Or so I thought – turned out Happy Homez had one more trick up their sleeve for us. A final ‘severance fee’ of two hundred quid
in addition to the ‘releasement fee’ we’d already coughed up to free ourselves from the contract. But I wasn’t put out by this, not at all. I’d gone beyond rage and into this serene, Zen-like state of calculated retribution, and I knew exactly how to put it into effect.
I’d be living abroad to conduct research for my developmental dentistry course, I’d said, and would be leaving most of my possessions in Big Yellow Self Storage off the A40, out in the Lynchian badlands of West London’s outer suburbs. My three housemates had scattered; I could hardly blame them, but as a plan formed in my head I realized it suited my purposes perfectly to be Happy Homez’s last traceable contact. They’d tried to get me to post the money or hand it in at the office in person, of course, but it tickled me to give them a small taste of their own medicine as an aperitif before the main course was served.