December 6, 2005
No students please
A lot of the accommodation for rent ads coming onto the various Adzooks sites refuse students, and despite having been one myself until recently, I can’t say I blame them. The impression of students given in the press tends to be of drunken layabouts, which to be fair is not quite true, in my experience at least. The only two people I knew who actually were drunken layabouts, spending their days smoking, drinking, playing spider solitaire and listening to radio 2, were both chucked out before they could bring the results average down. Curiously, though, the general tramp-like standards which are maintained as the norm are not particularly emphasised.
My first reaction to those ads is to have flashbacks of the kitchens in various houses I lived in while at uni, where plates would leave the house with us to go to lectures in the morning. I guess this is pretty standard though, along with melted ovens and saucepan-sized holes burnt into kitchen work surfaces. I’d be interested to know however, just how many other people had flatmates who would take a leak in their sink because the toilet was a whole 4 metres away (before you mention anything about builders, apparently they only use their customers’ sinks) and who would use their neighbour’s dustbin as a toilet when the real loo was engaged. Surprises certainly abounded in some of those houses.
It would seem these things don’t happen in houses of professionals, leading me to wonder if general house cleaning and domestication are skills gained on graduation. Results arrive and hoards of university leavers have a road to Damascus moment involving cleaning fluids: “what is this?” and the reply came “I am Fairy Liquid, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the kitchen.” But fair enough to landlords who don’t want to wait three years for that – take your chances with the professionals, they have more money anyway.
Posted by Selina at 3:36 PM
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November 22, 2005
Rent an ad
Last Easter a stray cat strolled into the house where I live and decided to stay. The cat, named Wanda after how she found us, is ok though getting a bit old and smelly. She’s completely house-trained and does like to sit on people’s lap, whatever they are doing: reading the paper, eating dinner, standing up. Also, once seated she has started to makes smells, really quite potent smells. She also loves to sleep on my bed, especially just after she has been running around outside in the mud – and the evil ogre who also lives in the house loves to let her in my bedroom. The best thing about the house where I live, and the reason I continue to live there, is the rent: brilliantly low even considering the amount I need to use the washing machine (call me squeamish but I don’t much like the earthy feel of grit and mud on my bed linen).
However, having reached a certain point on the relentless trudge through adulthood, I need to be thinking about moving again, regardless of the rent and not only because of the cat. So I scour the accommodation ads as they come onto Adzooks and in doing so I have noticed that the rather high London rent prices have gone astronomical. Fortunately for me and many others, the ads in question mistakenly say ‘per week’ instead of ‘per month’.
When posting an accommodation ad there is a box to enter the rent. Next to it is another box with how often the rent is to be paid. This second box has a choice of two fillers: per week and per month. Currently ‘per week’ is automatically selected, though there is an arrow by the side indicating choices. The number of ads coming through offering a room in the suburbs for £500 per week indicate that the Arrow of Choices has gone largely unnoticed. Though I’m around to fix such mistakes, it is probably better if posters of accommodation ads select the rent collection period they want, rather than run the risk of alarming potential lodgers.
Posted by Selina at 1:44 PM
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