Canadutch
Well I’m finally home again and god does it feel good. The past few days have been a big learning experience for me, and it’s been kind of a hard bit to swallow but I’m getting there.My last client that I was housesitting for apparently seemed to have a desperate need to get me out of the house before she got home. On the last night I was there (which was a day later than originally planned) I phoned her at 10:00pm to find out she’d be back at 2am and wanted me out immediately. Not sure when she planned to tell me this exactly, seeing as I had just called her, I guess she figured she’d come home and haul my ass out of bed at 2am and tell me to get out. In any case, she wanted me to leave my bank account number and she would transfer the money into my account. This is what I had done with my previous client, and I didn’t have any problems with it at all, but with this one it made me nervous.
When I arrived there it was all very rushed, I didn’t get the best instructions for their pet care, rather it was more like… here’s the animals (1 dog and 9 (YES NINE) cats), feed them. I wasn’t there long before I realized the dog had absolutely no training and was utterly and completely uncontrollable. Not only that but she was huge, which made it worse.
Her internet was broken so I said I could get Xander to try to fix it for them. She gave me the user/pass for their account so we could call and work with the ISP to get it fixed. When we called the guy laughed and said they were cut off because they didn’t pay. That’s when we noticed all the “Last notice” letters hanging around her desk (we weren’t snooping, when Xander picked up the keyboard one was laying right under it).
The next red flag was when the mail came the next day. I picked up the envelopes and they were all (no, I’m not exaggerating) from collection agencies. This was repeated for the following five days I was there. By the time I left there was a nice little stack of them.
So, when I phoned her and she asked me to go home and leave a note with my bank account number, I really wanted to trust her but it just rang very “the check is in the mail” to me. If I left it would be very easy for her to just never pay. It’s not like I’m a legitimate business that could get a collection agency after her, it would prob cost me more than what she owes me (200 euros). So I told her that I would rather not leave without getting paid. She then told me that she was bringing home a cousin with her and there was nowhere for everyone to sleep so I had to leave. I decided the best thing to do would be to be honest with her. I was stuck between being a normal person and a business person. Not that I know a lot about what a business person would do but I knew they would stand up for themselves to some extent. So I was honest with her and told her as nicely as I could why I was nervous about leaving without getting paid.
Then the screaming started. “How DARE you talk to me that way! I just burried my ex husband’s mother!!” she yelled (that’s why I was there, apparently there was a funeral and they had to leave at the last minute, hence me having to go there on such short notice), then continued on to tell me how it is none of my business, which perhaps it isn’t but as the person who she set out to fix her internet and collect her mail it was kind of hard to not notice it and be a bit worried by it. Xander had been hanging out with me there for the weekend so he’d seen this all going on as well.
So it sort of went like this:
Me: So when did you plan to tell me that we had to be out? It’s almost 10:30pm now and we were just about to go to bed. I wouldn’t have known at all if I hadn’t called you.
Her: We have been trying to find a place to spend the night but there are no vacancies anywhere so we didn’t know.
(I knew this was complete rubbish, unless every German on earth decided to spend the night on the side of the highway in France, this woman was lying. There are endless amounts of hotels along the way.)
Me: Would it be that much of a problem for us to still stay here this evening and go home tomorrow? It’s getting late and I hadn’t planned to leave until the morning.
Her: Well where do you suppose we all sleep? I am bringing a cousin home with us, we didn’t know she would be coming home with us. (She said this all quite pissy-like)
Me: What time did you leave Scotland?
Her: 1pm this afternoon
Me: Well doesn’t that mean you knew for the last 9 and 1/2 hours?
Her: HOW DARE YOU TALK TO ME THAT WAY!! (again)
(At this point I try to make her understand again that *I* don’t understand what is going on, and why this is all so difficult but end up giving up)
Me: Ok well if there is no place for us to stay that can’t be helped. We’ll just hang around until you get home and you can pay me and we’ll leave and get a taxi to the station or something.
Her: [[Raves]] I’ve just been driving for 17 hours!! blah blah blah blah where am I going to get money at 2am in the morning!
Me: A bank machine? .. and I’ve just been sitting in your house for five days as well, by the way.
Her: [[Raves]] HOW Dare you!! How dare you speak to me that way… (She raves on for a while)
It was hard to make out everything she said but I think at one point she said she’d get the money out, but then she turned around and started freaking out again and ended up just hanging up. I tried to phone her back for about an hour but she had turned her phone off.So there I was, sitting in this woman’s house. I had no idea if she was going to come home with my money but I knew she was coming home in a very bad mood. I didn’t know her very well but her reactions on the phone lead me to believe that being there when her and her herd of relatives came home (27 year old daughter, 19 year old son and whoever the cousin was) was NOT a good idea. The last thing I needed was for her to come home and go stark raving mad at 2am in the morning.
So, I had to suck it up and leave. I did leave her my bank account number but I really am not holding a lot of hope for ever seeing that money. I tried to phone her this morning and when I started talking to her I was told it wasn’t her, that it was her sister in law who came back with her from Scotland. It was strange because the person sounded exactly like her and I’d swear she’d told me she was bringing home a cousin. *Shrug* I didn’t argue though I just said goodbye when the “sister in law” informed me she was in bed. I asked her to call me back because I need her postal code to mail her keys back (which I took with me when I left, you know.. to lock up). She hasn’t returned my call.
So what have I learned? The smart business(wo)man trusts nobody. It’s half upfront from now on, unless it’s someone I’ve dealt with before. I’m going to be setting some serious ground rules in the future if/when I go on any more of these petsitting gigs.
Of course, she may not be as underhanded as I suspect, she may still pay up and prove me wrong but I have my doubts. I mean, her reactions just didn’t make sense… I asked Xander after I got off the phone, was I bitchy? Was I being sarcastic with her? Did I seem argumentative? I was trying to make sense of the way she was freaking out by me simply wanting to be paid, but he said I wasn’t.. that I just voiced my concern and was trying to reason with her. So the only explaination I can think of is that she just had no intentions of paying me and was pissed off that I wasn’t going away easily.
We ended up having Xander’s friend Padraig come pick us up (god love him). Like he said I may just have to chalk it up to experience. Which kind of sucks considering when you factor in train tickets etc, WE paid about 50 euros to housesit for her for 5 days. Nice, huh? Oh, well that’s not totally true. I did come home with about 50 bruises from her crazy dog jumping all over me me the entire time. pfft.
*Sigh* I dunno, maybe I dealt with it all wrong but can anyone blame me for being suspicious of her motives? What kind of person calls someone on such short notice (called Tues night and I went to her Wed morning) to come stay at their house for almost a week, leaves them there to pick up all their mail from collection agencies and then screams at them when they say they don’t want to leave without getting paid. Good grief!
Anyway, yesterday I went and got my hair done. I finally did the black and purple like I wanted and I think it looks pretty cool. Xander digs the shit out of it and thinks it’s sexy as hell hehe Well, that’s all my news.
