Review by: A Guest,
Oct 15 2010
From: Canada,
Accommodation Rental: 8 days
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Apologies for length, but I just want to detail what has happened since we arrived at the apartment on Saturday. We arrived at the apartment at 2 p.m. and met with Sara, and immediately discovered a few things:
- Sara told us that the shower was dripping; Sara insisted that she'd already booked a plumber to fix it, although she didn't say when.
- There is no real "wireless" in the department, as described: Sara provides a USB key that theoretically can provide an Internet connection, but since I'm travelling with an iPad, doesn't work (the iPad connects to wireless Internet connections, but has no USB input ports). Sara provided directions to a coffee shop about a seven-minute walk away, with the vague promise to reimburse us.
- There was only one set of keys, so my wife and I would have to arrive and leave together at all times.
I paid the balance for the apartment, and the two hundred pound damage deposit, in cash. I asked how the damage deposit would be returned, and Sara assured me it would be sent back via wire transfer (the same way I paid the original 400 pounds to secure the apartment).
Sara wrote down her phone number on a blue Post-It, leaving it on the counter.
With that, Sara left, saying she had an appointment. My wife and I noticed some other things almost immediately after she left:
- The dripping shower was dripping furiously, and since the bathroom is a wet room, it was splashing out across the entire floor, resulting in a... well, a VERY wet room. We had to use shoes to use the bathroom, or get wet cold feet trying.
- The toilet seat was broken: it had been placed on top of the toilet, but was entirely disconnected from it, so every time you sat down the seat would slide off; you had to essentially steady yourself somehow and not budge or the seat would fall off the toilet.
- The base of the cabinet in the bathroom was rotting due to the water situation (or for other reasons).
- The apartment was full. As in not a shelf empty, no storage space at all. It was as though somebody had left in a hurry: clothes filling the closet, miscellaneous stuff filling all the cabinets, a rotting avocado in the fridge, even sheets in the washer.
- The smoke alarm in the hallway, just outside the apartment entrance, was chirping every 30 seconds.
We were exhausted, and we're also not what I'd describe as fussy people. We decided to live with it for the night, enjoy our evening, and call Sara to discuss these annoying, but not life-threatening, problems in the morning.
Sunday morning, we bought a pay-as-you-go phone. We tried calling Sara, but got a "Network error" message on the phone. Turned off, maybe... church, dead battery? We had to meet my sister out of town in Essex (we're visiting for her impending wedding), so we took the train to Essex and didn't get back until late.
Monday, we tried Sara's number again, and got the same "network unavailable" message. That was weird. My parents had arrived in town to also help with wedding preparations, and we spent from the late morning through the afternoon with them, and when we finally parted ways after supper, I just didn't feel like walking several blocks and paying for a coffee just so I could write Sara to tell her she'd written down the wrong number. I did open my e-mail (locally stored), and found that the number she'd written on the Post-It matched the number in her e-mail signature.
Tuesday at 8:30 a.m., the shower had a catastrophic failure. Once turned on, it would not turn off: the knob had literally seized shut. I tried to turn it off, but couldn't. We tried Sara's number (the one she wrote down; the one in her e-mail signature) one more time: nothing. We double-checked it again versus her e-mail: it was the right number, and out of service. I went looking for a cut-off valve for the shower, and managed to find the boiler unit, so in the interest of not turning the apartment into a sauna, cut the heat. Grabbed my iPad and ran down to the cafe to use their Internet, banged off a frantic e-mail to Sara, and hurried back to the apartment.
By 10:30, the space between the base of the wet room floor and the top, where the faux-wood plastic "planks" you walk on are, was getting dangerously full. Grabbing a pot from the kitchen, I started to bail the floor, also catching the water from the shower and dumping it down the toilet. My wife moved everything off the floor in the rest of the apartment, in case the bathroom overflowed. We couldn't leave -- the apartment would flood (as would the rest of the building). With no Internet connection in the apartment, we banged on neighbour's doors
until we found somebody at home, who looked up an emergency plumbing service (Able Plumbing), who we called, and who said they'd have somebody out to us in two hours.
At 12:30, we got a call back from Able Plumbing that they couldn't make it out there that day. Still no word from Sara. In between bouts of bailing the bathroom floor, we ran back downstairs, had the neighbour look up emergency plumbers, and found one (West End plumbing, I think) that could make it out within the hour -- for ninety pounds an hour.
There didn't seem to be any choices left: Sara was uncontactable, the apartment couldn't be left or it would flood, I was getting tired of bailing and beginning to worry about what might be happening to the apartment below after four hours of constant water running; I didn't (and don't) know anything about plumbing. So we called the emergency plumber.
He arrived around 2 p.m. He pulled out the washing machine to look for the "mains" (a water cut-off valve for the apartment), and looked around the water heater, and couldn't find one. (It turned out later that it was hidden in the bathroom, behind the toilet brush and, ironically, the broken toilet lid.) He turned off the water to the whole building by popping open a plate outside the building on the street (which is pretty impressive), came up, inspected the no-longer-gushing shower, discovered that the cartridge which had failed (the reason for the drip, and for the total failure) was some sort of non-standard model, and that the best option was to "isolate" the shower -- essentially to screw caps on the pipes where the hot and cold water enter the shower controls. This involved running out to get the caps, and so on.
Sara called around 3 p.m. She said she'd just checked her e-mails. I told her -- with about as much calm as I could muster -- that we were incredibly not happy, and that I wanted, at the least, my damage deposit (which I had, again, paid in cash, on Saturday afternoon) back, and to be reimbursed for the plumber. She said she'd come right over. When she arrived, close to 4 (I think -- at this point, I'd stopped looking at what time it was), she didn't have any money with her. She'd deposited it all in the bank, she said, and since it was in a "savings account," it would take a "couple of days" to get it out. The plumber finished and asked for 180 pounds. Sara had no money. I paid the plumber, using the rest of the cash for our trip save about 40 pounds remaining.
Sara said the number she wrote down for us -- that she BORROWED MY PEN to write down -- on Saturday was no good, that she was now on a "temporary number," and that she'd e-mailed us the new number. That is a bald-faced lie: I've taken some screenshots of my e-mail inbox, and my last exchange with Sara, which was on September 22. The e-mail in her signature on September 22 was the number she wrote down, which is the number we were calling. Even if it weren't, why would the onus be on me to find places with wi-fi connections to check my e-mails on the off chance that a phone number I was given 24 hours before had been disconnected and replaced with another one? In the interim, my wife found a friend in town with a spare room that said she could put us up until the end of the week. There's no shower (obviously) in this apartment, and even if the shower were working, my wife and I have absolutely no desire to stay here longer than we absolutely have to. Sara made the incredibly inappropriate suggestion that we should shower "where she was staying" every morning, which -- I don't even know what that is. Words fail.
Sara promised to come by in the morning, "after the banks open," with a refund for our stay, my deposit, and the 180 for the plumber. I hope this happens.
What even a refund can't replace, obviously, is time. I get a couple of weeks of vacation a year. I don't have a lot of money to throw around. Even if I could stay in a flat in London for absolutely free, the airfare to get here and get home is a once-every-two-years sort of expense. I came here, with my wife, to enjoy London. I had six days, plus the day of my sister's wedding, to do that in. One of those days is now gone, spent bailing a shower, calling plumbers, and listening to excuses. At least half a day tomorrow is lost too, to sitting around waiting to see if Sara shows up with our money, packing, hauling our luggage across London (from Notting Hill to Greenwich) to "re-move" to my wife's friend's house. And there was so much we wanted, and want, to do: the British Museum, the Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert; having lunch in Trafalgar Square, going on the London Eye, looking at things we could never afford at Harrod's, seeing the Globe Theatre -- hell, you know London. You book apartments here. You know why people come.
So now I've lost a day and a half of that, time I can never get back in a place I'll probably never get to visit again. That's not a money issue. I'm stressed out; I've been writing this since 4:30 a.m., having woken up at 3:30 and lying awake until I realized I had to at least get this out to maybe expunge it from my head so I can get some sleep.
I hope Sara shows up, bright and early tomorrow, with our money; if not, I'll have to stretch 20 pounds as far as I can and then call my parents to ask to borrow some, which is about as low as you can feel when you're a man in your 30s. I hope to at least be able to afford to treat my new hosts to a nice dinner as thanks for putting us up.
Even then, I can't get this time back; I can't erase the fact that my wife's most persistent memory of London will probably be her crying in frustration as her husband bails out a flooding shower, with no idea what to do to try to fix it.
I've been on the other side of this equation, sort of. I used to co-manage a B&B (an eight-room place), and I saw faucets break and bedposts crack and all manner of minor catastrophes. Crappy things happen all the time. That was why I was willing to cut Sara slack about the lack of wireless and the dripping shower and the broken toilet seat; the overstuffed cupboards and single set of keys. Even when she was out of touch, after two days of no action on the shower, I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But leaving me a disconnected phone number? Not getting back to me for six hours after I e-mailed her in an emergency? LYING to me about e-mailing me a "temporary" phone number? Not being able to return, at the very least, the damage deposit I gave her in cash not three days before?
I really hope I can salvage this. I hope I can get some money back, and that we can go and crash at a friend's place and see if we can enjoy London for a few days after all.
But at 5:30 a.m., after writing all this out and after what's happened, I'm having doubts.
I have photographs, if you need to see them -- mostly taken after the fact, because this didn't seem like the sort of thing I'd need to document when we arrived. But if you need to see the post-repair shower, the jerry-rigged toilet, the state of the cupboards, the Post-It that Sara wrote her number on (now with the new number, the one she didn't e-mail me, written underneath it), screenshots of my inbox and the conspicuous lack of "temporary number" e-mails -- I can send those to you. If you like, I can get you the numbers for Able Plumbing, and for West End (I'd have to double-check that) to confirm that we called them. I know you're in New York, and can't exactly drop by to see things for yourself, and giving my growing unease that Sara might not be dealing with people in good faith, I'd be happy to document things for you as much as I can.
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