I am spending Saturday afternoon in the company of a property agent, showing me around apartments I’m looking to rent. It’s not how I’d choose to use my weekend, but if my current landlord isn’t renewing my lease because he wants to move into the apartment himself, then that, as they say, is that.
I am dutifully following the agent around the various units, but not dutifully following his automatic enthusiasm for each of the not-quite-right offerings he presents. It’s a smorgasbord of underwhelment (it wasn’t quite “disappointment”, so, yes, I just made a noun up that worked better. It’s my blog, get over it).
I’ve told him that an important criterion for me is to be somewhere quiet (I suppose the kind of place that I can write blog posts about him without disturbance). Specifically I say I don’t want to be near construction. I live in a city in the Middle East which for a long time has been an infrastructure work in progress and tower blocks are always popping up like Whac-A-Mole.
I approach the window of an apartment we are in, to be greeted by the sight of a grey, concrete shell of a high-rise tower block immediately in front, so much so that part of the sunlight is blocked. Also blocked is the much-touted “marina/sea view” which the apartment’s advert proudly sold itself on, using photos that I now realise were taken probably two years ago and conveniently (or inconveniently for me) not updated. I’m aware that misrepresenting an apartment sea view is a lovely First World Problem, so I don’t make mention. What does irk me though is that we are obviously in Construction-central and that is a Very Much My Problem.
I delicately point out to him the massive construction site looming like the Imperial Star Destroyer over Princess Leia’s rebel cruiser. He looks at it indifferently and concludes it is pretty much already built. I retort: it’s just the bare outer shell, open to the elements, and it will take another year to finish. He adopts an “oh well” attitude, and seems a bit disappointed that I spotted the building, as if he’d hoped I would have been too distracted by figuring out how the dishwasher works (or something) to remember to look out of the window. (“What? The dishwasher has both pre-rinse and quick-cycle functions?! Hand me that lease now, where do I sign?!”).
This is the last unit we are visiting in this part of town. Having come up with nothing, we loiter for a moment on the outdoor balcony from the lounge, like on a station platform having missed a train and there being no sense of rush to get anywhere anymore. He asks me where I’m from, and I say England just to confirm what he has already guessed from my accent. I politely return the enquiry. He hails from Liberia, but has been a bit peripatetic for several years. When I ask him which is his favourite of the countries he’s lived in, he answers Korea, without hesitation.
When he speaks, he has a disconcerting habit of corkscrewing “Ds” and “Xs” onto the end of words, like force-fitting pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. So “the manager of the properties”, for example, becomes “the managered of the propertix”. I try to visualize him speaking with locals in Korea. As I say, I try, but I don’t actually manage to.
I’ve been trying to tune my ear to his pronunciation frequency. I assumed he was doing the same with me, but I’m starting to sense that my companion is a talker and not a listener (or his listening is about as selective as a private members club in Monte Carlo). It feels like in any sentence he hears, he will catch a word here and there, a noun usually, maybe a verb. From these he will assemble a reply.
Communicating with him feels like approaching a speaking NPC (Non-Player Character) in a RPG (role-playing game) video game from the late 1980s. A NPC is controlled by the computer and interacts with the actual player’s avatar. I remember a frustrating game I played as a boy called Minder, based on a British TV show about wheeler-dealer salesmen. Each NPC was programmed to pick up on keywords from sentences I typed into a keyboard, and to respond from a list of stock phrases. I had to keep experimenting with different, specially curated sentences to see what would elicit the nugget of information I needed. You can “enjoy” a snapshot of its magnificent primitiveness here.
When I ask him when the first rent cheque is due he simply picks up on the word “cheque” and answers “yes, there are twelve post-dated cheques to cover the twelve months”. He then adds who the cheques are payable to, for good measure. He reminds me of the ill-prepared student who spots a keyword in an exam question and just writes everything they can think of about that topic, in the hope that somewhere swimming in the informational vomit will be the answer that can be fished out.
We venture to another part of the city, and enter an apartment. I remind him that I’m keen on some peace and quiet, and walk over to the lounge window to hear the road below. I tell him I’m going to just listen to the traffic; he acknowledges and then starts talking loudly to me about the various features in the lounge. I interrupt him politely: “hang on, let me just listen to the traffic for a second”. Perhaps he takes “for a second” as a literal request because he continues to talk.
I give up, and turn my attention to his sales pitch. Curiously, he is not dispensing the typical property agent buzzwords or labelling the apartment’s features with the usual euphemisms. No; he just seems to be saying out loud whatever he is looking at. At one point, he says “and that’s the window with the view of outside”. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be churlish, perhaps his point needed to be made; it’s possible after all that we could be in a David Lynch-ian construct and the view is in fact not of outside but of an inverted future as perceived through the collective conscience of each and every individual who has, past and present, ever walked into that room. It’s possible.)
He wanders absent-mindedly into the bathroom, without a care as to whether I’m following him, like the NPC that can’t quite adjust to the pacing of the main protagonist. There, he presses on with his soliloquy of inanity. He announces that the sink has lights, pointing to light fittings on each side of the bathroom mirror. He remarks that “the lights come with the bathroom”. The lights are fixed to the wall and, rather like the sink and the taps and the tiling on the floor, there is no reason to think that the lights will not come with the bathroom. I rise above the temptation to ask him, with the most earnest tone of voice, whether the bathroom door will also come with the apartment or will be removed prior to my moving in. (I don’t bother though, as no doubt his answer will instead tell me what the door is made of and if it has a lock).
We visit one more unit that day. It is in the same building as I currently live in, which is a bonus given I don’t want to move in the first place. The agent is well aware that I live in this block but he still proceeds to tell me about the building and it’s amenities. I stare at him, unblinking, and just nod. (I wonder: like in a video game, once he has exhausted the delivery of his latest stock information, if I stand there just gazing at him, will he stand there gazing back, in silence, waiting for the next input?).
When I enter the new apartment I tell him the layout is the same as my current one. He acknowledges this but his programming has already kicked in and, yes, you’ve guessed it, this man, this walking and breathing personification of a tick-box checklist, Describes. Each. Room. To. Me. I remain quiet. Sometimes there is no point raging against the machine.
A few days later we have agreed on a unit (not hard to guess which one I went for). In the run up we have had a couple of exasperating phone calls – the usual misspeak and miscommunication that has me reaching more than once for the deep breathing exercise on my Apple Watch. My only comfort is reminding myself that this interface of “agent” and “customer” is a necessary but temporary role play that will very soon be at an end.
We meet at the new apartment to finalise the paperwork and go over the snag list. I ask him if it’s his last appointment of the day. He says yes, and then mentions matter-of-factly that his wife gave birth a couple of days ago, so he’ll be heading straight home after this. I congratulate him and ask him if it’s their first child. No, it’s their fourth he says, in a low voice, and breaks eye contact, gazing again at the paperwork that he’s already reviewed. I am sensing a story, but one that he won’t be sharing with me. I don’t ask any more questions, but wonder what he is heading home to. I wish him luck and then after a few final professional niceties, he is gone.
Alone at last, I take a look at the bare doppelgänger unit that I will need to reconfigure into my home for at least twelve months. I walk over to the lounge window and listen: as expected, nothing. Just the hum of an empty fridge from the kitchen.
I will never see the agent again, and that is fine by me. But just for a short moment before he left, he was no longer a video game character playing the role of Frustrating Property Agent. My question about his newborn triggered some deeper coding, and revealed a glimpse of a life beyond the avatar, a life that continues, out of sight, after I put down the game controller and walk away from the console.