The company I work for deals with Housing. People move all the time, but once in a while, it’s because someone passes away. Because some people try to commit fraud (pretending someone died to dodge paying costs), we are required to get a copy of the death certificate.

I get a notification of someone’s passing, but instead of the certificate, we only get the invitation to the funeral. When we discover this, it’s the time of the funeral, so my coworker sends an email asking for the death certificate. We get no response, so a couple of days later, we call. No contact.

Our procedure tells us to cancel the cancelling of the contract, but we want to try one more time. I finally get a hold of the daughter; she rents with us, as well, and her birthdate says she’s middle-aged.

Daughter: “Oh, eh… the certificate… I didn’t send it? Oh, I have it here… Where is it… Here it is. But how do I get it on a computer?”

Me: “Do you have a smartphone? Yes? Do you know how to take a picture and email that? All right, then just email that picture to [address]. As long as we can read it, it’s fine.”

The daughter promises to send the email straight away! But it doesn’t come. Two days later is the first inspection, so I ask the inspector if she wants to ask for the death certificate. Perhaps the daughter wasn’t able to do it after all.

According to the inspector, this is how the inspection went, paraphrased.

Inspector: “Good morning.”

Daughter: Good morning. Can I help you?

Inspector: “I’m here to inspect the home of your mother. My condolences.”

Daughter: “But my mother doesn’t live here.”

Inspector: “Eh… According to my file, this is the house of [Mother], right? We received a request to cancel the rent because she passed away.”

Daughter: “Oh, she did, but she didn’t live here. She lived [a couple of houses away]. Oh, dear, I have an appointment with the inspector over there now!”

Inspector: “That would be me. Ma’am… which rent needs to be cancelled? Your house or her house?”

Daughter: “Her house, of course!”

Inspector: I see… Ma’am… I’m afraid you cancelled your house’s rent, not hers. But it’s okay; we can revert that! How about we go to your mother’s house together?”

Daughter: “Why?”

Inspector: “To… do the inspection?”

Daughter: “Oh, right! Where are my keys?”

Inspector: “Do you mean the ones in your hand?”

Daughter: “Huh? When did I grab them?”

Eventually, the inspector went with the daughter to the other home and did the inspection. They also went back and the inspector took a picture of the mother’s certificate. They calmly said goodbye.

When the inspector returned to the office, everything went super hectic for a couple of hours to revert one cancellation and start a new one, making sure all was documented.

Because of the gut feeling of the inspector, it was decided a social worker would check up on the daughter, as well. It might have been grief that caused this, but let’s be rather safe than sorry. Unfortunately (but understandable), due to privacy, I won’t be getting any more updates.

If you have a contract with us, you can call for a technician. Experiences in the past have taught us that sometimes you are done within half an hour, and other times you need an hour and a half. So, to be able to help people and give a clear indication, we offer timeframes of four hours. Experiments with making that timeframe shorter have failed, and the technician can take up to three appointments in that block. (If the technician is done sooner, we have several “no attendance required and not urgent” appointments we can do whenever.)

At 10:00 am, I get a call in English. While I’m quite decent with typing in English, speaking it isn’t always that great because I’m put on the spot. The man has a very heavy accent and is mumbling, making him sometimes hard to understand.

Me: *In Dutch* “Thank you for calling. How may I help you?”

Client: *In English* “I have an appointment, but I can’t find the time anymore.”

Me: *Switching to English* “Let me check this for you. I see that you made an appointment for today between eight and twelve. Let me call the technician and ask if he’s on his way.”

I call the technician, and the client is indeed next on the list. He just needs to finish things up, and then he’s on his way. Great! I relay this to the client.

Client: “How far away is he?”

Me: “I didn’t ask for his exact location, but he said he’s almost on his way and expects to be there soon.”

Client: “This is unacceptable! This is Holland! We made an appointment!”

Me: “Yes, we did, between eight and twelve.”

Client: “I can’t wait for twelve hours for someone to come! This is Holland! An appointment is an appointment!”

Me: “Sir, you selected the timeframe; we are just following what you selected.”

Client: “I had no choice! I demand that the technician be here within minutes!”

Me: “That is unfortunately impossible. He’s still on his way and will be there soon.”

Client: “This is Holland! This is Holland! We don’t make appointments within time frames. When we make an appointment, we get a specific time! Give me the technician’s number!”

Me: “I will not do that, bu—”

Client: “I will not wait for six hours! I have other things to do. I must bring back things I borrowed!”

Me: “Sir, timeframes do happen more often, and within your contract—”

Client: “You are not listening! This is Holland! Give me the technician’s number, now!“

Me: “Sir, I will not. I am able to ask him if he will call you, but if he’s driving, he cannot call you back.”

Client: “He can call hands-free! And tell him to call me, so I have his number and then I can talk to him! Procedures… I have my own schedule! You are being very rude! You are a racist! This is Holland! I will leave my door open, and if he’s not here within twenty minutes, he can go inside while I’m not here! And then he can fix it!”

The man continued to scream and eventually hung up. I did call my technician back, and I informed him of what the client had said. The technician laughed and joked that he would grab a cup of coffee first. After all, he had two more hours before the end of the timeframe. I hope I’ll get an update, but that’s at the technician’s discretion. 

This is the first time I have been called racist for following the appointment the client made themselves.

When I moved in with my girlfriend (who is now my wife), it took some time to get adjusted. Less than a year before, she had been forced out of her campus flat (since she wasn’t studying anymore) and had managed to get an apartment from a special social rental corporation for “working youngsters”. The rule was that you needed to be out of college, be under thirty-five years old, and either have a job or be disabled. Their apartments and maisonettes were located in a relatively decent neighbourhood which mostly consisted of family houses. Despite it being a very small apartment, it seemed quite okay.

So we thought.

First of all, you might know that bicycles are quite a thing here. All bicycles of our “stairs” (about twelve apartments with one or two people living in each of them) had to be cramped into one small shed. For some reason, people also put garbage in the shed that they couldn’t get rid of fast enough. There was even a spare door in that shed — God knows why. Of course, trying to get your bike in or out of it was not that easy. It easily resulted in bicycle dominoes or in actual damage. One of our more responsible neighbours put a new saddle on his bike, only to find it damaged within a few days.

The stairwell, right in front of our door, wasn’t treated much better. Someone (we never found out who) had the habit of putting bags full of garbage in there, suspiciously stuffing them away underneath the stairs. The housing corporation said they couldn’t do anything except send around letters not to do so. Apparently, hanging up a camera, like in the first flat I lived in, was too difficult? Of course, I got fed up and took action in the form of hanging up a note that the stairwells were no garbage dump. Nothing changed, and apparently, I was “passive-aggressive” for doing this.

Third and worst of all, the apartments were not really soundproof. The walls were thin, and everything was built around a small plaza, which was prone to cause echoes if people in the street were loud. Typical for the era in which these small apartment blocks had been built, bedrooms were all on the side of the walkway. So, if someone had friends over and they all went home in the middle of the night with quite a bit of alcohol (or other stuff) in their system, we were bound to be woken up from it. Heck, if anyone was just standing and talking on that walkway, we would already wake up from it.

The upstairs neighbours had a habit of putting on their radio really loudly. We had to complain several times before they finally got the message. During the day, this was bad enough, but a few times, they even did it during the night. They also owned a small dog that wasn’t properly trained and yapped ALL. THE. TIME. (Nowadays, we own a doggy from the same breed ourselves, and it barely barks or yaps, so it’s really a matter of training them.)

The neighbour on the left side. [Neighbour #1], clearly smoked weed every day. We could smell it on our balcony. Over time, he also developed the habit of putting on his radio… really loudly! It was always around 7:00 pm. He also got into verbal fights with the neighbour on his other side, [Neighbour #2], accusing him of setting his car on fire.

The reason for their falling out was that [Neighbour #2] had the habit of coming home from work really late at night, after which he — guess what — put on his radio really loudly!

One night, we woke up from the police knocking on [Neighbour #2]’s door after [Neighbour #1] had called the police about the music. Apparently, the guy was so intoxicated that he didn’t even notice the police ringing his doorbell and knocking on the door for about five minutes. In less than a week, the two neighbours shouted insults and accusations at each other. The same day, they made up on a whim and offered each other a beer as if fights like this were extremely normal. Meanwhile, we were not feeling so safe around these two anymore.

The worst offender, however, was our neighbour on the right side, [Neighbour #3]. Because she always — drum roll — put on her radio really loudly! After some talking to her — which wasn’t easy with our conflict-avoiding nature — she took it down a bit and even warned us when she was having a birthday celebration. But then, something changed. She started hosting parties at her apartment for no apparent reason. The music was extremely loud, and the guests were even louder. They also went onto the walkway, talking even louder. There were nights we barely got any sleep. We never found out what caused the change, but we suspected that it was just to spite us.

And all these stories about loud music only cover the people living directly next to us. The downstairs neighbours rarely caused any noise, so it wasn’t just the poor building or us being sensitive. My girlfriend told me that before I moved in, there was a summer night when she couldn’t sleep because some idiot in one of the other apartment buildings hosted a complete party with a DJ in his garden — which was on the side of the plaza, mind you.

It was all bad enough for me, who had to get up at 6:00 am every weekday to go to my job. My girlfriend, on the other hand, was chronically ill and really needed her rest to get even the simplest thing done.

One night, when we barely could sleep again, my girlfriend broke down and told me how much she hated living there. When she had moved in, she had already told me that she did so because she had no other choice, but now she even admitted that she had wanted to leave as soon as she had moved in. I suggested staying a week at my parent’s house while they were on holiday; we couldn’t afford a real holiday ourselves at the time and she really needed to get away for some time.

We were very happy to move away from that place, about sixteen months after I had moved in with her. We never looked back. And at least the description “working youngsters” made a lot more sense now, since many of these neighbours had proven to be completely immature.

I have to send a parcel, and I buy the “stamp” online. I head for the postal office to drop it off. The postal service I decide to use is originally a yellow German service and more of a store-in-store type.

Employee: “Oh, you bought a stamp online. We have a self-service for that now; you can scan your parcel over there.”

Me: “Oh, I didn’t know. Thank you!”

I head to the self-service station, and I arrive almost at the same time as someone else. I didn’t see him heading that way, and I am there before him.

Customer: “Cutting the line, are we? Hahaha!”

Me: “Oh, eh… I’m sorry.”

I try to scan my QR code stamp as quickly as possible, but first, I don’t squeeze the handheld scanner enough, and then my phone screen with the QR code isn’t bright enough

Customer: “Man, cutting the line and being slow! Hahaha!”

I am getting embarrassed, working as fast as I can, following the instructions. I finally scan the package and get a sticker barcode to paste on the parcel. Of course, the sticker doesn’t want to come off.

Customer: “It’s complicated, isn’t it? Hahaha!”

Employee: “Sir, did you buy a stamp online?”

Customer: “No, not needed.”

Employee: “Oh, the self-service is for people who bought a stamp online. Let me help you over here.”

Customer: “Oh, so I didn’t even need to wait for this slow lady! Hahaha! Here you go! These need to be returned.”

Employee: “Eh… sir? This type of return address only works with the [National Orange Postal Services].”

Customer: “Yes, that’s exactly right!”

Employee: “We don’t have a contract with [National Orange Postal Services], just the [Yellow German Services].”

There’s a short silence.

Employee: “I think you need the store next door.”

Customer: “Oh, eh… thank you.”

From laughing and joking to silent and red. I was okay with that.

I am female and Dutch. I get a phone call.

Me: “Hallo?” 

Telemarketer: *In English* “Good afternoon. May I speak to Mister [My Name]?”

Me: “You mean Miss [My Name]?”

Telemarketer: “I am looking for Mister [My Name].”

Me: “What is it about?”

Telemarketer: “About his business.”

Me: “It is my business. Miss [My Name]. There is no Mister [My Name].”

Telemarketer: “Oh…” *Click*

I was left with so many questions.