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Interior Life of an Estate Agent. Part 12

Sometimes I just get fed up. Not unreasonable when the working day starts at 8.45 am (first fifteen minutes unpaid) and runs until 4.00 pm without a lunch break, or any chance of a cup of tea. By 3.00 pm I am feeling cranky, although everyone I’ve met today has been a pleasure to spend time with. Maybe it’s just dehydration and starvation but, when the fat guy and his partner arrive I feel that I’m really not at my best. Is it me, and has my professional attitude deserted me in my comfortless state? It’s cold, windy and rainy, and I am in and out of the car, driving all over the county taking people into cold, empty houses. What I could really do with is a nice cup of tea and a piece of cake, preferably sitting somewhere warm. What I get is a fat guy who does not speak, at all.

I start off trying to get some eye contact, to engage one or other of them but it’s no dice. They don’t even speak to each other, merely move lifelessly forward, without apparent enthusiasm for the house, or for life, but I can just discern some indistinct murmurs coming from the female of the species. My chatter sounds irritating, even to me, without any response and, as I point out the lovely garden, and explain the direction of the sun during the day, they gaze blankly, lacking even the animation of a nodding dog. They stand, motionless, in the hallway, until I almost want to kick one of them. Yes, this is the hall; there are other rooms, please move. I point out the storage spaces then fall silent. I feel drained by their vacuous inertia and, inside ten minutes, I am exhausted. Then, as they stand outside with vacant expressions, both viewing the roofline, he speaks. He speaks. Why are the interior room ceilings at different levels? I explain. Silence.

People out there, when you go to view a house with an agent please put them out of their misery by saying you hate the place, or you don’t know what you feel about it, or it’s a possibility or, hallelujah, you love it. If you hate it on the outside, don’t even bother going in. It’s torture. If you’re really feeling sympathetic towards me now, you could also bear in mind that, at £6 an hour, I will never be able to afford the houses we are looking at, so be kind. No filthy capitalist me, I get nothing out of it.
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