Another couple of updates to the Eircom/Landlady Sagas. One comes to an end, but the other might just be kicking off:
Just scroll down to the red text.
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Ice Cream!
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And While I’m At It
My last post on my Eircom woes actually made me feel better. I guess it’s good to get it out and if it’s somewhere online, even if it’s only read by a handful of people, it feels even better. So, I thought, if it was good for that one, maybe I’ll try it with the other big frustration that’s going on for me right now…my old landlady.
Haha…the risk of this is that she reads this blog. I doubt it, it’s highly unlikely because otherwise she’d know about the cat wee incident and we’d have heard all about it before now. So, I’m going to risk it.
We have had a very good track record with our landlords. With a lot of our landlords we became good friends and we’re still in touch with them. One couple we were tenants of even came to our wedding. So, I think we’re good tenants, yes, the cats can be a pain, but we’ve always taken care of whatever damage they might do and it’s always been minimal.
Enter our latest landlady…from here on in I’ll call her Mrs. B (use your imagination)…we should have heard warning bells when she haggled our rent from our offer of €1,100 a month to €1,125 (yes, that’s €25), but we just thought it a bit strange and agreed. Later on she pulled out the horror of a kitchen and had a new one installed. We were out of the house for five weeks while it was being done and yet we got no rent reduction for that time. Again we said nothing because we were just so happy to see the back of the old kitchen. After it was in, she told us that now we had a nice new kitchen they’d be upping the rent come the end of the contract in June. Ok, we thought, we’re moving anyway, but Matt started to worry about our deposit.
When it comes to Matt and me, he’s definitely the pessimist and I’m the optimist so I hoped he was wrong about this one. It’s not looking good though. In the run up to giving back the keys at the end of June, we cleaned the house from top to bottom. Matt filled any holes we might have added to the walls for pictures and painted the hall and living room. He cleaned the carpets as well and we made sure the whole place looked just as we’d found it…better even. I thought she surely had to give us our deposit since there was nothing she could compain about. ha!
I wasn’t there when Matt met her to hand over the key, I kind of wish I had been. She looked at all our hard work, took the key and when Matt asked about the deposit she told him “Sure…as soon as you wash the blinds and clean the kitchen…” Ooookaaay, eventhough when we moved in I had to pay for cleaners to come in and clean the kitchen (I was 8 months pregnant at the time) and wash the windows. Matt brought up the kitchen palaver and her response was that we had gotten off lightly with that one since she could have put up the rent after that had been done but she hadn’t. Aww, ain’t she so kind. Nevermind that she could have done no such thing before our contract came up for renewal.
So Matt, bless him, got out the basin and the Ajax there and then and cleaned some more. Mrs. B told him she’d be around in the next few days to inspect his work and then she’d see about the deposit. GRRRR! This is where I want to slap her. A deposit is not meant as a ransom to your tenants to get them to do your bidding. Will we be walking her dogs and cleaning her toilet next?
We handed over the keys a week ago and still no sign of the deposit. I don’t even know what we can do if she refuses.
**Update. July 10th: Mrs B is still holding onto our money. Matt spoke to her today to ask point blank “When can we expect our money?.” There is some rubbish along the side of the house that we had told her we would clear this week. A lot of what is there is debris from when the kitchen was installed that they never cleared and some is garden debris from the tall trees that are all around the garden. I don’t believe any of this is our responsibility and really, our part of it is just a crate of bottles to be brought to the bottle bank. Her response to Matt’s call today was “As soon as the rubbish is cleared, the money will be transferred to your account.” I really wanted to get heavy with her, but Matt wants to take the high road (this is a compete role reversal for us!) and fulfill our end of it before starting to play the lawyer card. So, I’m going to go along with him on this one….for now.
**Update. July 14th: Well, the rubbish has been gone now for four days. We rang her on Tuesday to tell her it was gone and she brought up the Waste Charge. For my non-Irish readers, here in Ireland there is a charge for having your non-recyclable trash/rubbish taken away…this includes a pick-up charge and a weight charge. I paid our outstanding bill before we left and put some extra in to cover any pick ups that might not have shown up on our account yet. I even spoke at length to the Council over a week ago to make sure we were all paid up, they assured me it was settled. Mrs. B claimed on the phone that she had rung the Council and we’d not paid our bill. We were able to come straight back at her with the receipt number of our bill for the exact amount. “oh, um, I’ll get back to you when I check this number with the council.”
We’ve heard nothing from her since then and, as of this morning, no money has yet shown up in our account. I think it’s time to call a lawyer…
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How Eircom Lost A Customer
**image borrowed from www.eircomtribunal.com**
Ah, sure it’s no news to anyone in Ireland that Eircom, our state phone company, are a right shower of crooks and scoundrels. Dealing with them is like taking a time machine back to the days when Haughey was Taoiseach and monopolies ruled the roost. I can’t understand why we always seem to take it though. I mean we know they are useless but we just shrug our shoulders and say “ah, that’s Eircom for you.” I suppose that’s the frustration of a monopoly. There’s nothing we can do.
As of today, we have been in our new house in Greystones for one month and one week. Before we moved I checked with Eircom to make sure that our phone was connected and suitable for broadband and they assured us it was and gave us our new number. The day we moved in we plugged in our phone and the line was dead so we rang Eircom. Here is a run down of what has happened since. I plan to update this until we finally have a connection just as an outlet for my frustration:
June 7: Line is dead so we ring Eircom. We are told that there has been an EE failure on our line which means that they cannot reconnect it electronically so a technician will have to come out. They cannot give us a date for when this might happen but the technician will be in touch to arrange an appointment.
There was a letter waiting for us from Eircom when we moved in with forms to fill out for Direct Debit billing. We fill these out and get them sent off to Eircom.
June 10: We receive a bill from Eircom charging us €28:16 for our line rental for June…on a line that doesn’t exist. There is also a charge for reconnection of €20.65 which is waived because of some kind of promotion. I can only surmise from this that if the promotion wasn’t running they would have charged us for a reconnection that never happened.
As we meet our new neighbours and get talking to them, we discover that one family waited 4 months and another waited 6. This is not good as I conduct all my business over broadband and the only broadband that is available in Greystones requires a phone connection.
We have an overlap in rent with our old house so I can continue to work there for the time being. I commute to and from Greystones for the next month in the hope that the line will be reconnected in time.
June 25: We call Eircom once more as the deadline to hand over our old keys approaches. While speaking to them they notice that the details they have for us are incorrect. Somehow they have our old details down on our files. Guess what…that means start over. AAAAH!
July 1st: Hand over of keys so I no longer have access to broadband. I move all my computer equipment to my parents’ house in Killiney so I can use their broadband. I am in the middle of a crazy deadline so I can’t stop working until this is sorted out. Being freelance, if I don’t work I don’t get paid.
July 6th: Today I ring Eircom once more to try and get some kind of answer to when they might get around to connecting to us. I’m told, in a tone of voice that suggests this is a well-used answer, that there is a minimum of 28 days waiting list for a technician to call out. When I ask what the maximum is they tell me they can give me no further information and that everyone waiting is in the same boat. When I try to explain about needing the broadband for work he repeats the mantra…”I’m sorry, but there is a minimum 28 days waiting list…blah blah blah.” He can’t even tell me when this mythical 28 days started from.
**Update. July 7th: I have discovered that there is one company that will provide wireless broadband (no need for a phone line) in my area. On paper the deal even looks better than what I had before…2mb upload and download, 1:24 contention ratio, no limit on downloads, no installation fee. Wow, sounds great right? Yeah, only problem is that it’s with Irish Broadband…one of the most complained about Internet providers in Ireland. A quick search on www.boards.ie returns pages and pages of unhappy customers. There are a few happy ones…but mostly it’s bad. I won’t know which camp I’ll fall into until it’s installed…so, do I take the chance or do I sit it out and wait for Eircom? Rock< --Me-->Hardplace
**Update. July 10th: Well to be honest, we’ve heard nothing more from Eircom; still no word from a technician, still no idea when we’ll be connected. We did however make an appointment with Irish Broadband and they will be coming over tomorrow to hook us up, so I guess we’ll see what their service is like. If it’s fast and reliable I think we’ll be looking at ditching the landline altogether and using VOIP instead. If it’s as bad as some out there on the boards are saying…we’ll drop them and be back to waiting for Eircom.
**Update. July 14th: Irish Broadband came and hooked us up with no problems three days ago. I moved my computer out of my parent’s house and started working from home again on Wednesday. Straight away the connection is faster than we had before using U.tv internet. The other thing we were worried about since it was wireless and dependent on line of sight to a radio mast, was lag but this hasn’t been a problem either. My online gaming habit is in no danger 🙂
So, yesterday, when we received yet another bill from Eircom charging us another month’s line rental for a line we cannot use, we had the pleasure of ringing them and telling them we would no longer be needing their services. We told them that Irish Broadband took three days to come and connect us whereas we’d been waiting over a month for Eircom to even give us a callback. So from here on out it’ll be Skype and mobiles for us and no more Eircom. I need to retitle this thread to “How Eircom Lost A Customer.”