Waste disposal

When we moved into the house, it was stuffed with rubbish. This was wide and varied; from used condoms on the windowsill, to draws full of old video players, digiboxes and wireless routers. The one common factor was that it was all useless and worthless.

After a few weeks, we gathered up all the electrical items we wished to be disposed of, and gave them to the landlord who said he would be happy to get rid of them. He carried them out of the front door: we presumed to his car so he could drive them to the nearest council run tip to dispose of them properly.

This was not the case, as we discovered on putting the bins out later in the day. He had walked the rubbish round to the back of the house, and used it to completely fill the neighbours bins.

This happened again when he replaced the stair carpet (roll the old one up; stick it in the neighbours bin), and bore a remarkable resemblance for his method of disposing of the other rubbish that was around when we moved in (put it in black bags, throw it over the back wall into the alley behind the house).

What a great guy.

Ice

Most of these stories are not in any kind of order. This is because there is a large backlog of them, and it doesn't really matter anyway.

Recently, our fridge/freezer broke: it started dribbling water out of the front, so there was a fairly significant puddle every morning. We asked the landlord to come and repair it, which he did.

I arrived back home after a run to find all our frozen food scattered around the floor (it apparently hadn't occurred to him to attempt to keep it cold, or even on a clean surface), and the freezer in pieces. After a further thirty minutes or so, the repair was complete, and he began reassembling everything, and putting our (now defrosted) food back inside. The problem appeared to be fixed --- all great.

Recently however, we noticed that the ice maker appears to be broken: insofar as it no longer senses when the box is full. Presumably he didn't put it back together properly after his previous repair. Upon showing this to the landlord, his only response was to tell us we needed to "drink more things with ice in!", before walking off.

Great.

When things first came apparent...

After my housemates and I had looked round the property we had decided it was more or less okay (and were sufficiently sick of looking round houses that we decided to just take it), though the landlord was perhaps a little odd. We went over to his office to go and sign the contract, where we were asked to remove our shoes on entry. This has never happened to me at any other place of business, but being the polite young men we are, we complied.

This was the point where the first massive lie occurred.

Landlord: "So that'll be £268 per month, with the same again as a deposit."
Tennants: "Okay, that sounds fine."
Landlord: "I'll also need a £100 admin fee from you all."
Tennants: "... Your advert said no agency fees."
Landlord: "This isn't an agency fee! It's an admin fee! To do all the reference checking, and data entry, and that sort of thing!"
Tennants: "So... All the things an agency does?"
Landlord: "No, it's an admin fee."

As I've said, we were all sick of looking at houses, so decided to cough up without further argument. But it was a sign of things to come.