Silly things we get told by 'Salesmen'

Not salesperson but a silly little admin in some company who had dropped a shitty little photocopied bit of paper (not even a proper flier) through my letter box. It told me they were working on my neighbour's electricity and had to turn it off at the mains so I HAD to be in at xx on xx day to facilitate this.

Year right! The houses are detached.

I rang them up and told them "well you are neither the government nor the local authority so you have no right to give me orders. If you would like to apply for an appointment and my busness services my terms of trade are XX per hour or part thereof."

Admin person: we dont do that

Me: "I am not a charity and being told that I have to take time off work to suit your purposes and some random person who lives nearby does not work for me. So Ill leave it with you."

Never heard any more of the matter. Could have been a scam

Love the albino hamster story!

Following throat surgery I had a squeaky little voice for several months. I really loved the telephone cold callers who asked to speak to my parents. In answer I would whisper ‘They’re dead”, which is perfectly true, and put the phone down.

Estate agent as we looked out of the window of possible property to buy, and saw a socking great rat running along the wall - "Oh look" says I, "There's a rat." "Oh no, says the lady estate agent, "I am sure it was a vole." A vole! - it was the size of a small cat!!

Must have been the rare Western Giant Vole Luckygirl

The latest laugh was a driveway salesman telling me that increasing the parking space would add 10k to the value of my house. The cost of said driveway? 10k!

When I was looking for a house to buy, I met with an estate agent at a property for a viewing. All was going well, the downstairs was lovely and suited my needs. We then went upstairs into the smallest bedroom which was really tiny, I had already had the details and knew the sizes so was planning to use it as a study.

I was surprised to see a bed in there as I knew neither of the walls were long enough for a bed due to the cut away for the stairs. The estate agent proudly announced that it was a proper bedroom as it had a bed in it and he implied that I was wrong about the measurements. So I looked closely at the bed, pulled back the covers and discovered a plastic bag full of newspaper resting on some cardboard boxes!

I did not buy the house, not because of the bed fiasco but because there was no room for a washing machine other than in the detached garage - not ideal for me. But really, a cardboard bed designed to fool a viewer, I don’t think so!

I have just had my roof insulated. I was given the price and told that the government had currently reduced the VAT on it to 5%.This reduced the total but not a great deal. Cue a lot of head scratching and calculations and I was given a much reduced price "If I signed now!" I said it was a lot of money and I'd have to think about it. Could I let him know tomorrow? After a lot of sighing he said he would ring at 10am tomorrow because that was as long as he could hold that price. Come 10 am and I told him I'd thought about it carefully but really couldn't justify spending the money. Thank you anyway and goodbye. More calculations and he was suddenly able to knock another £800 off the price, bringing it down to the sort of amount I'd been intending to spend. Those consumer programmes can be really useful sometimes.

Ages ago, when discussing a new kitchen with the designer at home.
I had very definite ideas of what I wanted (in a none too big kitchen) and that did not include any ordinary base cupboards, the kind you have to bend down and scrabble about in. I wanted pull-out drawers, so much more useful.

The bloke said I’d need some ordinary base cupboards or I’d ‘rue the day’! And dh dared to back him up - as if he had a bloody clue! ?.
I went ahead with what I wanted and never rued so much as a minute. The kitchen is ancient now but still works very well.

Ha ha. I’m enjoying reading these!
I have a story. Not strictly a salesperson one though.
One day I heard someone hammering something into the ground outside. I opened my front door to find a suited man putting a for sale sign up in my front garden! “Excuse me,” I said but, “This house is not for sale! You must have the wrong one.”
“No, no you are wrong,” says he rather snootily and continued putting the sign up.
I told him in no uncertain terms to take it down or I would telephone the estate agent. He then said that my husband must have put HIS house up for sale without telling me.
“This is MY house and I am not married yet!”
He would not believe me and said to talk it out with “my husband” when he got home!
This was in the 1980’s.

In the process of moving into a brand new house and one door was sticking . Along came the company joiner who took door off and gave it a good planing . He put it back and still the door was sticking so even more heavy duty planing . After doing this several times we realised he was planing the top of the door and he had taken so much off it it had to be replaced.

Floradora9
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Witzend I agree with you re the pull out drawers in the kitchen. Best thing out and they allow me to use space which I would not be able to do without them. One of the first things I did in our new home was to have some put in.

A couple of experiences from me.

Soon to be married I was shopping for household goods. The rage at the time was unbreakable glassware - plates, cups saucers etc. I liked the products and was discussing the virtues with my Mum when a salesman came up to us. He told us they were unbreakable and proceeded to take a cup and throw it on the floor. You guessed it, it shattered all over the place. I did later actually buy some of these cups and
unfortunately most of them are still going strong today 50 years later. Unfortunately DH loves them but I would much prefer they no longer graced our kitchen.

For many years I bred and showed dogs. This entailed a lot of grooming and of course one of the tasks was nail cutting. Rather than use a nail cutter on tough black nails we used a file to keep them in trim. Needing a new file hubby told me to go to the hardware shop and ask for a bas**tard file. (I believe now known as a cross cut file) Off I went and asked for this to which the male salesman went into sales mode for 10 minutes telling me that was not what I needed and was I wanting to file metal or wood. Clearly a female would not know one file from another. He then asked what I was going to use it for and I told him to file the dogs nails. Coughing and spluttering he handed me the asked for file and I left him scratching his head.

Not so much silly as very odd, as I thought at the time - an estate agent one.

We viewed a flat and I phoned later and put in an offer, just a bit below asking.
The EA (who’d been very pleasantly chatty and told me his father was a vicar (!) then said yes, as long as I could exchange contracts that same day.
Well, of course I couldn’t - I’d never heard of such a thing. But he said it was quite usual.

Some 3 months later, I checked the sold price - WAY below my offer, around 25%.

The blurb had said it had belonged to someone at the EA -AFAIK they’re obliged to say this. Evidently they’d only been going through the motions of having it on the open market - it had been earmarked for a mate, or a son or daughter. Plus it had been a rental, so the much lower price would have reduced capital gains tax by quite a bit.
Dodgy buggers!

Several years ago, buying an extension cable to connect my laptop to the landline socket - the young chap in the electrical shop told me the cable I had picked up wouldn't do as it needed to have the same plug on both ends.

Obviously he hadn't a clue, so why didn't he realise that and keep his mouth shut?

I never buy insurance on white goods. However, years ago, I listened politely to the salesman when I was buying a new microwave. He emphasised the necessity of insurance as the product would be replaced if and when it broke down. When he finished his spiel I politely enquired as to the most frequent cause of breakdown. 'Slamming the door of the microwave' came the reply. I thanked him, and said that I would not slam the door. Bless him, he'd talked himself out of the sale of insurance!

We put our house on the market, and then received an unsolicited call from an agent ( of a nationwide chain) who said he could offer us a great deal. Very pushy and aggressive sales pitch on arrival, and said we should be asking a price which was ridiculously lower than the figure we were marketing the house for. He kept ringing over the next week saying that because we hadn't sold (in a few days!) did we now see why his valuation made sense? We in fact sold the house the following week, and he actually ran out of the agency one day when I walked past and said I might have told him I had sold the house 'as a matter of courtesy'. Why he felt he was owed that courtesy when we hadn't employed him...I did point out that we might well have sold the house extremely quickly if we had put it on the market for about £75k less than its market value, but we then could not have afforded to move. I've never met such an aggeressive sales technique and heard so much rubbish spouted, even for an estate agent.

Hetty58

The latest laugh was a driveway salesman telling me that increasing the parking space would add 10k to the value of my house. The cost of said driveway? 10k!

I think we must have met the same sales person, Herty58!!!

I've moved quite a few times. It always staggers me when in a tiny room or a place which needs gutting/stinks the estate agent denies/argues about the size or the condition inferring I don't know what I'm talking about. I can see it! I'm in there! I don't know what conditions some of them live in then.

I viewed one place and liked it, went away to think about it. Next day I told estate agent I'd been up to the road the evening before, the bloke across the road, a potential neighbour, had been rude to me [also a parking problem when everyone was home from work] and I would not be buying. She screamed at me that I was not allowed to go up there, not without her. I shouldn't have walked up there. Not gone to the road, or passed outside the house! She got in a real state, really upset and angry that I had walked past the place. It was very odd.

Also, the day before she had sent the boss to value my house. She looked around, talked about the market, etc. etc. and refused to tell me what percentage she would charge to sell it, despite me asking 3 times. It was all bizarre. I didn't sell with them. That agent has now gone out of business since the pandemic.

When looking for a new or newer car I and a friend of mine doing the same, have been patronised by salesmen. Some seem to think that we know nothing...I've been driving for 45 years, friend for 25yrs. Some think we can't afford the car. I informed one rude one I could afford to buy 20 new cars for cash and left. Friend is Director of a company and we also went to buy elsewhere after a misogynistic salesmen tittered at her when she was weighing up whether to lease or buy the car outright/cash. He thought she was making it up.

Next place...salesman was lovely. Polite, helpful and professional.

I went to a major flower show with a girlfriend. She was interested in buying a huge (and expensive) wrought iron arbour for her garden. The (female) assistant actually suggested that if my friend asked her husband nicely he might buy it as a birthday present for her!! My friend is a top flight London solicitor and earns many times her husband's salary. She just quietly replied that if she had wanted to buy it she would have done so herself - we left. The owner of the stand definitely overheard the conversation, I just wish we had heard her reaction.

I also have a friend who arrived in a Land Rover Discovery (unseen by the salesman) at a main dealership to enquire about replacing it. The salesman's first comment was "you know they are very expensive don't you?" She was made to feel awful - she left - went to the next dealership where she was offered coffee, a drink for her grandson, and nothing was too much trouble. I still think she should have reported that first man.

A male friend went into a car dealership, interested In buying, he was greeted by a salesman with the words “hello mate can I help you ?”
He left.

Granarchist, I’ve known more than one case of female salespeople either patronising women or deferring to a man also present.

The one I remember most (she called at the house, it was probably re double glazing) addressed virtually all her remarks directly at dh. She also wore a see-through blouse and batted her eyelashes at him a lot.
It was so obvious!

We’d had a virtually identical quote from someone else (a man who hadn’t ignored me) and when the time came to choose, dh said he thought we should go with see-through blouse.

I said, Oh, because she batted her eyelashes and flashed her cleavage at you?
To be entirely fair to dh, I don’t think he even realised quite how she’d ‘played’ him!
We went with the other.

Re snooty salespeople, here’s another EA one.

An ex colleague’s daughter was left a very substantial sum by a long-estranged grandparent.

When she was no more than 30, and probably looked younger, she decided to buy a house, and having seen something she liked, called at the EA.

One of those hair-gelled, 20-something young EAs took one look and evidently made up his mind there and then.
‘You do realise that this is a very expensive area?’ he said. (Code for clear off, you evidently can’t afford it.)

‘Yes, thank you - I’m interested in X property.’

He gave her a pitying look. ‘Have you got a mortgage offer in place?’
‘Oh, no need - I’ll be paying cash.’ ?
His face was apparently a picture!

When I was newly married a salesman came to the door and asked me if my Mummy was in! I was mortified.