Red flags, lowballs and coughing fits: when house-sitting goes horribly wrong
Getting ready for a house-sit in the Thai countryside, we soon learn that with Jerry, everything is very urgent, but everything is excruciatingly slow.
“We’re gonna need the whole evening to go over the things,” Jerry the home-owner says, “and we’ll have to wake up early tomorrow to show you more things, because we leave at 10 am.”
Spoiler alert: Jerry and his wife Jan (fictional names) will leave at 3:30 pm the next day.
A few rhetorical questions
Will Jerry have extended coughing fits without covering his mouth? Of course he will!
Will Jerry admonish his wife for sweeping the leaves in the garden while he’s trying to fix an unbroken garage door? Of course he will!
Did Jerry low-ball us with already stringent conditions that became even more complicated and obtuse as soon as we stepped through the door? Of course!
Oh! Do you like it when a couple fights right in front of you multiple times within the short yet interminable time-frame of your combined presences in the house? Ha! It doesn’t matter what you think!
🚩🚩🚩It’s complicated 🚩🚩🚩
There were red flags.
It was complicated getting a specific time for a video call when we were in Canada, with continued cancellations and rescheduling. Finally, the planned call started later than its scheduled time, and although Jerry had another one lined up right after us, he insisted it take a whole hour.
In that hour we were hostages to self-interruptions and anecdotes about family members we were never going to meet and behind-the-scenes complications that didn’t really affect us.
Jerry’s Welcome Guide is a long, confused hodge-podge of spontaneous, unedited brag-notes about his water and electrical systems that he had custom-built for the Chiang Khan house, and there are unending explanations about upcoming or delayed deliveries for things you’ll never use or see in the house.
Upon arrival, Jerry informs us that he has written a new version, and maybe that updated version is online, maybe it isn’t, and could we tell whether we had read the new or the original version? Could I tell whether I had read the Snyder cut? He couldn’t!
Welcome to Housesitting Hell
With Jerry, everything is extremely important. You know this because it’s always premised that way, but within the first minute of any explainer, and there are many, many of them, he’ll veer off about an incompetent step-brother, or he’ll spend ten minutes explaining how the Thai people are hard-headed, or he’ll complain about how the last house-sitters, or the ones before that, or the ones just before that, had broken this cheap component, or misused this dodgy system.
There is no discrimination in Jerry’s explanations. He’ll hook you with something about the main water heater and the importance of keeping this or that valve locked or unlocked, but immediately you are exposed to an unrelated anecdote that has seeped itself into the explainer, taking over, and now you are no longer learning about the house’s thunderbolt protection system, you are being told about delivery delays in China for the electric vehicle he’ll be leaving with.
Oh, they will eventually leave! But until that electric vehicle was finally out of sight, I had stopped believing in their departure, as we had been stuck in a torturous twenty-hour loop about obligations and hoses and valves and please kill us all, how long can this take?
Entitled
Will Jerry try to make sure the garage door closes to the last millimetre with both a physical key and the digital system? Will he spend a whole hour asking you to push down the garage door with your feet, suddenly transforming the mere act of closing that door into a three-person operation, while you’ve been welcome as a two-person couple? Of course, of course!
It doesn’t matter if you already know how to use a microwave because you live in the twenty-first century. He’ll still explain it to you, and start debating about spare parts with Jan.
Oh also, do you know that you shouldn’t press on a coffee grinder for ten minutes straight, thus risking a short fuse? Of course you do, because you’ve never ground coffee for more than twenty, thirty seconds, tops. But this somehow needs to be said.
Will you use the television and the computer? No matter! Let me show you how the printer and the scanner work, in case you need to use this technology because taking a picture of an important document with your phone would somehow be impossible to do.
Hey, Jerry’s opened the TV, and he’s on YouTube, and a few minutes ago he told you about this really funny Thai commercial about bug-spray. You ask him to put that commercial on. Does he hear you? Why are you still asking these questions? He’s put Spotify on now, and wants to know if you have an account.
Oh, do you want to listen to meditative songs on full blast for two hours while still more explanations are being given? I hope by now you understand that you do not matter.
Please, please, just leave already!
The low-balling continued to the very end, as we were forced to accompany them on a last-minute errand into town.
My girlfriend MJ had repeatedly asked for an hour or two of driving on secondary roads to refresh her manual driving skills, but this was out of the question: either she hopped in the car now, under Jerry or his wife’s supervision, or there would be no car.
A few minutes with the wife panicking every time the car stalled and the test-drive was a failure. We were not going to use the truck.
We entered town, gloomy, defeated and undone, and were contemplating our options. We had a whole month here in the beautiful countryside, and upending this would be a costly, complicated affair that would likely end up tarnishing our house-sitting profiles.
Left alone in the supermarket, for the first time in the last twenty hours, we tried to reason with ourselves. Jan mercifully booked us a somewhat expensive rental car, but it was either that or the old dirt bike.
We took that deal. At that point, we just needed them to leave, and connect with the space and with the pets, whose needs and habits we were barely told about, even though the whole premise was built upon taking care of these adorable animals while their owners were gone.
As the sun sets, we sip beers on hammocks, debriefing incredulously, trying to take in the mountains, the fruits, the road, the countryside.
We hope this is worth it. But had we known, had we known…well, there were red flags.
P.S : the last housesitting experience was absolutely perfect. No notes.
Red flags, lowballs and coughing fits: when house-sitting goes horribly wrong
Tu racontes très bien. Ton histoire est intéressante.
Profites de ce beau coin, chanceux!