Tenant takes revenge on Foxtons with hit Facebook rant

 
Facebook rant: Lecturer William Brown
Lindsay Watling23 October 2012

Faced with a leaky roof, a TV that didn’t work and a broken vacuum cleaner, William Brown contacted his letting agent Foxtons expecting the problems to be fixed reasonably quickly.

But when the weeks turned into months and — in spite of a series of emails — the gremlins in his rented flat remained, the London university lecturer vented his frustration in a message to the agent and shared his rant on Facebook.

The message, which suggests that the company’s automatically-generated out-of-office email should read: “No, I don’t care about you as a customer, so why don’t you talk to my computer rather than wasting my time with your problems?”, has become an online hit.

Dr Brown’s troubles began when he moved into the Goldhawk Road flat in the summer of last year with a friend who used to work for Nasa.

The lecturer in film and TV studies at Roehampton University was told the roof would be fixed “immediately”.

But Dr Brown, 35, who has a PhD in contemporary cinema from Oxford University, claimed his e-mails were “repeatedly ignored”. The message adds: “The vacuum cleaner is only one of a few problems, about which I have written to you.

“Perhaps most unreasonable, middle class, and first world of these problems is the fact that the flat is not enabled for digital television.

“Now, I don’t really watch television, but I do occasionally enjoy the odd show — so any movement on that front before 2013 would be much appreciated.

“Also of concern is the leak in the roof that we have been mentioning to you since before I moved into the flat.

“Obviously the leak does go some way to mitigating the lack of a vacuum cleaner since we can use the water on the floor as a means of scrubbing up some of the dust that has accumulated. But on the whole, I think I’d prefer to live in a flat that had a vacuum cleaner and no leak — not least because fixing the leak was a condition of moving into the flat in mid-2011.”

Dr Brown adds: “I don’t know if anyone told you this, but the 1980s ended over 20 years ago.

“And while the 2000s saw the re-emergence of the cowboy worker who felt authorised to treat their customer like excrement, the 2010s are not the same.

“Get with the times or await the moment when your would-be clients have had enough of the contempt with which you seem to treat everyone.”

Despite the letter’s success on Facebook, Foxtons has yet to take action.

Today a spokesman said the company did not wish to comment.

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