It's starting to get ugly...

Day 7: Unpacking and fixing

Today is our seventh day in the house and repairs are soon under way. The wasps and bees will soon be history…Henri, the bee guy, is on his way to relieve us of our unwanted charges.

Later today the dishwasher should be delivered…hurrah, my first since leaving the US. After the refrigerator fiasco with DEFY, we popped for the extra money for the Bosch…we’ve had one service call on the Bosch washer in its almost seven years with us and the service was swift and sure: no calls in five years now. DEFY would have been cheaper in the initial outlay, but if the fridge is any indication of their build quality (we KNOW it is an indication of their service quality) it would be penny-wise but pound-foolish to buy one of their appliances again.

The dog house is delayed until later in the week, as is the pool repair, but today Manie, a professional handyman, should pitch up and take a look at the myriad of little things that need attention, from doors that won’t stay closed to a malfunctioning curtain rod to sticking drawers to a broken drawer slider.

We still don’t have telephone service and, therefore, no internet. Seems that we actually have to present a physical presence at the telephone company offices to place an order for service, even though the house has a phone line already installed…nothing like convenience to the customer, ya know? Small wonder more and more people are eschewing the phone company in favour of cell phones and wireless internet providers. Cell phone companies are in every mall, large and small, and the wireless internet guys come to you with their product and service. In a time when companies are seeking ways to boost their business, Telkom seems bent on diminishing theirs with crappy service and forcing customers to go through hoops. We will be considering the change to wireless…and the people who moved into Hell House are already wireless. That’s the way the world is moving anyway, and Telkom is giving South Africans a huge push in that direction with their cavalier attitude towards the convenience of the customers and their service delivery (it takes a personal visit to the phone company and then WEEKS of waiting to get your phone service turned on here, even if the house is already wired, as opposed to a single phone call and just HOURS for the service to be turned on in Silicon Valley).

So, Hubby is off to Telkom, to see if he can get our phone and internet turned on while I wait for the bee guy, the handyman, and my new dishwasher. While I wait, Thandiswe and I continue to unpack boxes, trying to figure out new places for all the old stuff. Soon the cottage will be empty and we’ll begin advertising it…the next phase of the move in will be getting tenants!

11 am
The previous owner did not pay his electricity account for the last three months and somehow the payment the attorneys were supposed to make to clear the account is lost in transit because Eskom just showed up and cut off the power for non-payment. Joy. When this happened at Hell House, it took 23 hours to get the account restored. We may be in for a dark night and more take out food.

5 pm
The power is back on, after Hubby made a trip to the electric company and made a fuss. He transferred the electricity account to our name but it seems the previous owner neglected to pay his bill for rather a long time since his past due balance was R107,000…yup, six figures!! Now, Hell House was shut off for a past due account of R3300, which probably represented between two and three months arrears, so you have to wonder how long Mr. Seller went without paying his electric bill!! According to the electric company, Mr. Seller went into their office last week and paid R50K to keep the lights on, so his complaint to Hubby that Eskom “overcharged” him would seem a bit hollow…who pays fifty thousand bucks in such a situation?

The bees are gone. Another mark against Mr. Seller here…Henri, the bee guy, says the nest has been there a very long time and it was a very big nest. The seller told us back in March, when we viewed the house for the first time, that the irrigation system was not working, so we expected a non-functional irrigation system. What he didn’t tell us was that it was not working because there was a big bee swarm inside the utility box that houses the valves and controls!! That I consider to be a definite deception on his part…Henri spent two hours here wearing a bee suit and carrying around a smoker, collecting what he termed “killer bees.” This is Africa, after all, and these are African honey bees. He also said this swarm was super aggressive: Thandiswe was standing well away from the box when Henri went to examine it and a bee flew right at her and stung her on the face!

But they are gone now, along with their cousins the wasps and with any luck they will find a happy home with Henri in Pretoria. He carried away a big wooden box full of bees…with their “lovely queen”…and two big black bags full of honey and honey comb. Thank goodness they are all gone, and I wish Henri luck with them!

We are making headway with the unpacking. Hubby’s wardrobe is pretty much liberated, a good portion of mine found and hung in the closet, and today we pretty much unpacked the dining room, including the liquor cabinet and the wine stash. The parts I really want to tackle…the study and my sewing/craft area…will just have to wait until the necessary stuff is addressed.

Manie and I crossed wires and so he will be here tomorrow morning…just as well, since we found three more things to add to the list, a door that won’t lock, a window that won’t close, and a problem with the dishwasher…no place to drain it! Another deception on the part of the seller, since there was a dishwasher in the kitchen when we viewed the house and there is a tap to fill it and a plug in the wall to plug it in, but no drain!!

Poor Yorkie is having a fit…Hubby put up the second baby gate today so we can open the patio door for ventilation but she cannot sneak out into the patio. Until the pool is repaired and cleaned, I don’t want her out there…I need to take her in the pool and teach her how to get out if she ends up there accidentally and today the water is a lovely lime green with white foam spread across the surface like so much lace…not exactly something I am keen on leaping into, Yorkie in hand.

We are awaiting take away food yet again, the order placed before the power was restored. I tried cooking breakfast this morning, but it was not as successful as I would have liked since the stovetop seems to have a mind of its own and no markings on the knobs to tell me if the thing is hot, cold, or in-between. The ceramic stove top is made by DEFY as was the one at Hell House, so I assumed that the heating was done essentially the same way…the furthest you can turn the knob away from “off” is the hottest…it appears, however, that turning it all the way to the end of its travel actually shuts it off again! The soft boiled eggs first turned out raw (insufficient heat to the pan) then turned out hard cooked (too much heat). This is going to be a steep learning curve. The oven, however, seems to work and the bagels I baked the other morning came out quite nicely.

So, today rolls to a close with yet more evidence of deception and mean-spiritedness on the part of the seller, a triumph over the forces of nature as the bee swarm was relocated without sending me to the hospital, and another dozen or so boxes emptied and flattened.

Tomorrow we resume.

Sorry to have neglected you...

Sorry to have been gone for so long, but sometimes life takes precedence over blogging…blasphemous sentiment, I know, but there you have it.

We are desperately trying to get our cottage rented. You see, we have a mortgage on the rental property and if two of the three units aren’t rented, those mortgage payments come out of our personal pockets, which are a bit on the flat side since we took our fabulous holiday to Durbs. The big two bedroom flat is coming vacant on March 1 so it’s important to get the flat rented so we have enough income to make the mortgage.

Two of the three flats went vacant on December 1, so we’ve been scrambling since we got back from Durban to get them advertised and shown to prospective tenants. We did manage to get the 2 bedroom flat rented and the tenants moved in Saturday, but the cottage still needed cleaning and showing and hard work makes me too tired to think, let alone blog, hence my prolonged absence.

Anyway, I just got back from showing the cottage…we’ve decided to rely on rental agents to a large degree this time because we’ve just not had good luck finding honest, reliable tenants on our own. Last year at this time we were scrambling to repair the damages and replace the furnishings as a result of inadvertently renting to a crackhead. What furnishings he did not sell (including the bed, the refrigerator and even the pots & pans!) he destroyed. We had to repair plumbing, carpets, walls, and even replace the custom-made blinds he destroyed. His six-week tenancy…at R2500 per month…cost us R20,000+ in damages. Had we the facilities to run a credit check we might have picked up on the dodgy nature of this guy, but we couldn’t and we didn’t and we paid for it…literally.

Another reason we are using rental agents is that I am sick and tired of wasting time and gas driving over to show the cottage to people who just can’t be bothered to keep their appointments. It’s only 2km to the place, but that’s 4km round trip and as much as I love my Bertha, I have no illusions about her…she is a gas hog. More important, however, is that I invest time…I drive over, unlock the place, open the blinds and windows and turn on the fan and then sit and wait…and wait…and wait…for people who don’t even have the manners to call and cancel their appointment. The agent, who stands to make a fat commission on renting out my cottage, doesn’t want to piss me off by being a no show…it’s a very competitive business and if she stiffs me, I’ll never list with her again.

Because I live so close to the rental property, it is tempting to tell these prospects to go to the cottage and call me when they get there, but my cell phone service seems to have gone to H-E-double toothpicks the last few weeks. It’s never been good and we’ve called the provider out before, but this time it just sucks. I get “missed call” messages when I’ve physically had the phone on my person and it didn’t ring. It’s not the phone…I’ve had three phones since I moved into this house and it was a problem with all of them. My friend Sally cannot use her phone at my house (same provider) and Hubby has the same problem with his. Yesterday I got a voicemail from the provider…he called and the phone never rang at my end, so he had to leave a message. The SMS notifying me of his call came several hours later when I was away from home…in a place where I have signal.

So, they send a technician out and he agrees (like the last technician) that I have crappy signal here. He wants to put a signal booster on my roof (Hubby’s solution when he tried to resolve this two years ago). Problem is, we don’t spend enough money on their crappy service! Seems our R400 per month usage is about one third of what the cell phone provider requires in order to put in this booster. Hello? So it is OK for me to spend almost R5000 per year on a service that is unavailable to me half the time and substandard the other half? What part of this equation am I not getting???

The local telephone (landline) company is called Telkom…but subscribers universally refer to it as Hellkom. And with good reason. This is the epitome of a company that exists for the benefit of their shareholders and to hell with its customers. There are never enough employees for anything you wish to accomplish with them, whether it is a simple inquiry into your bill, reporting a fault, or ordering new service. You can expect to be in a queue of no less than thirty minutes and then be served by someone who is a) clueless, b) apathetic, c) unable to think…and sometimes all three. Oh…and don’t forget rude…if you don’t accept their bulldust line “Oh, your line is fine…I know your ADSL is dead, but my computer says your line is fine!” then they get mad at you and get rude. My friend Sally moved recently and it took three weeks for her telephone line to be installed…and even longer for her internet connection. Hiring more people (there is more than 20% unemployment in this country…there are lots of people willing and able to work if someone would just give them a job!) could only improve the situation: more installers means lines installed more quickly, more customer service reps and shorter queues and both add up to greater customer satisfaction. But who in Hellkom cares when they are a monopoly and their enraged customer base doesn’t have anywhere to go? As long as the shareholders are happy with their ever-increasing dividends, who cares if the phone service is crap and the phone company is universally reviled?

If you are tempted to say “Well, it’s Africa, what do you expect?” well…don’t! The problem is not our location, it is that pernicious mindset that has crept into the country from the First World: screw the customers and f*ck the employees, just maximize profit. Telkom posts obscene profits every year without bothering to upgrade its infrastructure, improve its service, or increase its headcount. In fact, a couple of years ago, it made deep cuts in the headcount, improving profits at the expense of service. A little piece of American culture that I do not miss at all.

On a lighter note, we have had a little excitement on the block this week. Ferrets are not native to any part of Africa, so Thandiswe can be forgiven for her wide-eyed panic at seeing a ferret drinking out of one of the basins beneath the courtyard fountains the other day. She was convinced it was the biggest rat on the continent!

I found some pics on the internet of ferrets and showed them to her and she identified the animal she saw as a ferret. Once I explained to her that it probably was feeding on the mice and moles that plague us, she was a bit relieved…”It’s not dangerous?” she asked me. I am sure she was thinking of the two-month-old baby boy she brings to work, tied to her back, every day.

How did I know it was a ferret? Well, it’s been hanging around our block for a couple of months now. I suspect a neighbour had it as a pet and it escaped. Sally, who lives a block away, has seen it in her garden and I’ve seen it in the street at least twice, as my neighbour across the street. Since I’m not farming chickens and the vacant lot up the road is farming moles, I’m happy for the little varmint to stay.

Speaking of varmints…I’m deathly allergic to bees and in South Africa, nobody has window or door screens. Go figure…the mosquito capital of the planet and there are no screens! So, a bee got into the house yesterday and Hubby is on a business trip so he can’t come rescue me…what to do? Well, as luck would have it, the nasty little creature buzzed his way into the retreat, where the air conditioning doesn’t reach because I have the heavy curtains pulled. It doesn’t seem to be here today so either it found a way out or the heat baked it dead…I am hoping for the latter.

But, this morning one of my neighbours, whose back garden wall touches part of my garden wall, came by to tell me that there is a huge swarm of bees in one of the trees at the back of our property! I sent Thandiswe out to see if she could spot it (not something I am willing to risk with my allergy) and she came back saying the garden shed was full of hundreds of bees! Lord, what do I do now? Hubby is out of town and I don’t dare go out there and try to do something about it myself. Thank goodness he had the excellent foresight to install air conditioning in the bedroom last summer so I don’t have to open the windows!

Well, duty calls…must go show the cottage again…hopefully this one will show up!