I had my lounge cleaned recently. It did not go so well. Please find below my email of complaint.

Hi, I just thought I’d share my not-so-great experience with All Carpets coming to clean my lounge.

Here’s what I expected:

1. My doorbell would ring, there would be someone here to see me.
2. I would buzz them in and they would come to my door with the stuff required to clean my lounge.
3. They would clean my lounge.
4. I would pay.
5. We would all smile and they would leave.

Reasonable, right?

I got this:

1. A phone call 20 minutes before arrival, cancelling me. Seriously. Lucky I don’t have a job and didn’t need to take the day off work or anything.
2. The guy said he would call me tomorrow, and hung up.
3. The next day I got a call, the guy was 20 minutes away, was now OK? Sure, I said, why not.
4. 20 minutes later I got another call, he was downstairs, could I come down. Sure, I said, why not.
5. I went out the front. I saw a van with a guy in it, on the phone. He appeared to wave at me to just wait. Or to come into the van, I don’t know. I stood like a goose on the footpath waiting for him to finish his more-important-than-me phone conversation.
6. He came out, said quite a few words, asked me where he could park. I said I don’t know, was he looking for something different to the spot that he was currently in? I felt guilty that I was not more of an authority on parking around my building. He said he’d park in the loading dock of my apartment block. I said he probably couldn’t. He ran off into the loading dock area. I waited because I can’t run. He came back and told me that parking wouldn’t be a problem. I was relieved and worried, which rarely ends well. He parked on a weird angle actually blocking where the trucks come in (we have quite a busy loading dock).
7. He said he wanted to come up and see my lounge before he brought his stuff up. That sounds good, I said. The wheels were in motion.
8. He checked out the lounge. It seems to be a leather and cloth mixture, he said. He didn’t seem sure and I didn’t know you could mix leather with cloth, I was worried again. Is that like a hybrid cow/sheep/cotton plant? But he’s the expert, so I smiled.
9. He asked me to come down again to help him carry stuff up. I said I have a back injury, I can’t lift anything (true). He said so do I (true) and he promised to only give me light stuff. What a sweetheart.
10. We came back down, and my building manager was there furious that someone had parked blocking the loading dock. So this lounge cleaner argued with him. Looking to me to back him up. As though together we could convince the building manager that removalist trucks do not in fact require access to the loading dock. He took the building manager to one side, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but lounge cleaner put his hand on building managers shoulder and my god I thought the building manager was going to thump him. He lost the argument.
11. He got the cleaning stuff out of the van, left it in the loading dock area in the way of anything that moved and hopped in his van and took off. I’m left standing (once more like a goose) next to the lounge cleaning machine (from the 80’s), hoping that no cars come or go because I really didn’t want to try and move the thing and wind up flat on my back.
12. He came back maybe five minutes later. He explained that he parked in a spot but couldn’t work out how to pay for the parking, so hadn’t, so would have to come down and check it later. I then got the five minute diatribe on what he thought of parking and how it made him feel when he had trouble finding a spot to park. I shrugged my ignorance of local parking for the tenth time and smiled, like yeah, I hear ya man, parking sux.
13. I was handed a bucket and a hose to carry. He was right, they were quite light. Wheels in motion again!
14. Fast forward a little bit and he’s finished with the lounge. It looked it over and with great subtlety brushed my fingers over the bits that didn’t look clean. I didn’t want to say anything because that would be rude. He noticed and assured me that the lounge was clean, but just appeared darker in certain spots because it wasn’t dry. He also explained that you can’t put too much cleaning stuff on it. And I thought, whenever someone gives two excuses for the same thing, only one is really true.
15. He asked me to help him carry stuff out. But only to the lift, he could take it from there. So I carried the bucket and hose the 7 metres from my apartment door to the lift and we said our goodbyes. He said something about parking as he got in the lift.
16. The couch is now dry, and it’s not clean. I’m not sure what chemicals are used, but it seems to brighten up the fabric around stains. I seriously have a stain that I didn’t know was there before.
17. I can live with it (there’s children starving in Africa, why do I need such a clean couch?), but if I’d seen all of this in a premonition, and seen my not-really-very-clean couch at the end, and seen my wallet $140 lighter, I would most definitely not have bothered.

A special note to the defamation lawyers, I am referring quite specifically to the ‘All Carpets’ you will find at http://www.allcarpets.com.au. Bring it on.

I got a reply to this rambling email. A thank you for amusing the poor chap in charge of customer relations, and an offer to come clean my couch again.