Be a dear and hold my handbag while I saw off this shotgun.

If I am ever jailed, it will not be for petty theft, drunk driving or even arson. It will be for assaulting an employee of an infamously badly run letting agent. However as prison blue is not quite my colour and the idea of being surrounded by 1000 women interchangeably named Codlin, Bezuida and Nomad fills me with a fizzing terror, I shall vent my rage in a note to the offending service provider (and we use the last two words verrrrrrry loosely)

Before we begin, it must be known that I am having a particularly foul week and that today I am as vituperate as I have ever been. Ah, a moment’s silence for the violence that will never be.

Dear Letting Agent Owner

I am so glad to find that you are as busy as you are, as under this current harsh economic climate I believe many companies, companies that actually service their customers, that add value to the infrastructure of a city, are quiet, depressed, even liquidating. But you! You are a veritable playschool of activity. I know this because when I tried to phone the maintenance department today to staunch Old Faithful which has erupted in my bathroom, it took two hours, 24 games of solitaire and a lifetime’s worth of tinny Ode to Joy to hear a voice actually belonging to a human being. Do you employ actual humans there, Letting Agent Owner? Or is your company run by headless, wingless, featherless battery chickens? Do they just swing around in their wheelie chairs, flesh sacks incapable of answering their ringing phones?

Perhaps not. Let’s give your company the benefit of the doubt. To my credit I hung on like a beaver, and after being told several thousand times that my call was important (was it, Mr Letting Agent Owner? And if so, how important? Important like salt is important on a tomato or important like having the right tampon for the right day of the flow is important? I’d like you to clarify. I would like your voice prompt to tell me exactly how important my call was, on a scale from one to ten, or in a metaphor involving a bag of groceries) my call was eventually answered by someone who had either just woken up or had in the last five minutes suffered a minor stroke.

Pippa: Pippa hello

Me:       Hi, I’m phoning to find out where, on God’s green earth, the key to my electric gate is. My address is xxxx.

Pippa:     What?

Well. What an interesting question Pippa. So easily interpreted so many ways. Are you asking what a key is or what my address is? Both of those are simply answered, but if you are asking what God’s green earth is we may find ourselves in a hot topical debate, which I’d of course love to participate in, were I not making vast and complicated arrangements to set up camp outside my house BECAUSE I CANNOT GET INSIDE IT.

Me: What do you mean, what?

Pippa: Say again?

Oh give me strength give me strength.

Me: Pippa. I need to determine the whereabouts of the key that lets me into the electric gate at my home at this address xxxx

Pippa: Oh. I don’t know if that gate has a key.

All over the world, dear Letting Agent Owner, little green villages are missing their idiots because you have hired them all.

Me: Trust me it does. I live there and I have enviously been watching other rent-paying tenants come and go, warmly and securely with such devices while I try again in vain to light my dustbin fire with wet kindling and the contents of my briefcase.

Me: Pippa can you please put me in contact with someone who can help me (and someone who has a standard five)

Pippa: Uhm… ok, hang on…

(Several alarming whizzing, buzzing and shrieking noises and I am surprisingly put through to another actual human being)

D: Hiya it’s Daleen

Oh god.

Me: HI Daleen. Just wanting to get hold of the key to the electric gate for residence xxxx.

D: Oh….errrrrr. I dunno where that is?

Me: The key or the residence?

D: Huh?

Me; Do you not know where the key is or where my house is?

D: Uhm, I think you might need to ask the caretaker.

Me: Oh. Well, can you let me know where to find the caretaker?

D: Uhm, he lives in your building.

No! Surely not!

Me: But WHERE DALEEN

D: How must I know?

Never mind, knocking on doors for the rest of eternity is a treat if it gets me off the line with you.

Me: Can you please put me in contact with someone who knows what this man’s name is and where I can find him so that I may in fact access the home I pay for.

D: Uhm. I can let you speak to Cindi

(can you also see the little heart hovering above the i?)

Me: FINE. Whatever it takes.

(squawking ,shrieking and mechanical muttering)

Cindi: Yes?

Yes? Yes to what?

Me: I need to find the caretaker…

Cindi: NOT my department.

Me: But I’ve just been put through to you for this very matter.

Cindi: Not my department.

Ok.

Cindi: If you’re looking for keys the caretaker will have them, that’s the way we operate at this letting agent.

Well my dear, I think many people would disagree with your use of the word operate, but nevertheless.

Cindi: Thank you for calling

Really? Really?

The next day I found a man rooting around in the undergrowth in front of one of the flats in my block.

Me: You aren’t by any chance the caretaker are you?

CT: Yes I am, that is why I am wearing this absurd Mad Cow t-shirt and have a coil of rope around my waist

Me: Oh great. I need the electric gate key for xxxx

CT: Well I don’t have it.

Me: But the letting agent said you did!

The man fixed me with an expression so sardonic I’m not likely every to experience such a look again.

CT: And tell me. At what point exactly in your interaction with the letting agent did you lose all sense of reason and begin to believe them?

There will be blood.

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