Colin Stokes, MD Of Adiuvo, the UK’s largest out of hours call handler for the Property Industry, reviews his favourite calls of last year.
Whilst providing our services and dealing with serious issues from floods to fires we also receive, amongst our 550,000 odd calls, a fair number of “unusual” ones so we thought it might be fun to review three of our favourites from last year;
- Missing Wedding Dress; a caller contacted us distraught that her less than perfect (not the words she used) moving company had left multiple items in the common parts instead of disposing of them as was arranged. Even worse they had mistakenly left the residents boxed up wedding dress, obviously a wanted keepsake, amongst those items. The Managing Agent had then, quite correctly after serving notices removed the items. Fortunately we were able to contact our client who confirmed which contractor had carried out the removal and even more fortunately the items, including the unharmed dress were still at their depot and the dress was saved and recovered.
- Inappropriate Sunbathing; you may remember the heatwave last year and obviously residents took every opportunity to enjoy it (or needed to be outside in slightly cooler conditions) however we received multiple complaints about one specific resident who was utilisng their balcony for relaxing in the sunshine. Nothing particularly unusual about that until it was noted by several callers that the person in question was completely naked and in full floor of the all the residents of the block opposite.
- Alien Invasion?: One resident called reporting a disturbance above their top floor flat and our initial expectation was that it could be animal or weather related (winds having caused an issue perhaps) or even an intruder however unlikely. It was none of these according to caller because they seriously believed the issue to an alien spacecraft having landed.
We obviously have had, historically, other interesting calls and our two favourites are still, a caller ringing the emergency line to report their flat mate’s burst appendix and perhaps our number one where a resident, after an argument with their partner at 2am pushed him out into the corridor naked and then proceeded to deliberately set off the fire alarm via their internal smoke detector to ensure multiple people left their flats to encounter said naked person.
Maybe one day we should write a book.
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