Impossible to work

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I attempted to start my apartment search today. It was a massive failure, however, because I started looking with Chicago Apartment Finders. I had to reschedule this morning from an AM to a PM meeting time. They were great about changing the appointment time. That was the only great thing about them.

My appointment was for 2:15. I got there at 2:15. I filled out a web form that emailed me something at 2:17. Then, I sat down in the very posh waiting area, including a saltwater aquarium. I waited. I got out my crossword puzzle book and waited some more. Then I got a cup of coffee from the sugar-zone and waited. Directly after the first cup, I tried to call some friends. I got no cell phone reception, so I got another cup of coffee. Somewhere around the start of the second cup of coffee I realized that every pointless excess in the office was there to foster some extra bourgeois affectation. That’s cool, but I don’t want to sit around in a nice place waiting to talk to someone about seeing an apartment. I want to not be forced to wait. After about an hour, which was also when I realized that everyone else who was waiting before or right after me was already gone, someone asked if I had seen anybody yet. I said no. And then I waited another 15 minutes to speak with a man I’ll call Skeevish.

Skeevish started out nice enough. A loud and slightly short Chicagoan. He asked me about how long I’d lived here. Asked me if I was Jewish or Italian (because of my hebraic last name and its link to an important Sardinian king of the 19th century). The answers were all no and then he asked me about what kind of dog I had (and then told me it was going to be hard to find an apartment) what I was looking for and if I was ready to plop down a check today.
I told Skeevish no. Today is the beginning of my apartment hunt, I’ve got other appointments this week, and I have well over a month to get out of this place (but the sooner I move, the sooner my dog gets to live with me again). So I said that I wasn’t in a hurry but that I would write a check if I saw the place today.

He told me all about how Chicago Apartment Finders are there to save me time. Since I had already lost over an hour of time to waiting for them to save me some time, I wasn’t convinced. He also told me that other services in town have listings with mainly the same landlords (so I should just cancel that appointment I’ve made with another company, right?). Skeevish then looked for apartments for me. Oh what a joy. After a bit of this, I started reading last week’s New Yorker (namely the Solzhenitsyn excerpt). About halfway through the piece, Skeevish informs me that he more or less doesn’t have anything to show me today at all.

Now, if you spend five minutes trying to get me to commit to writing a check for a new apartment today, shouldn’t you be pretty sure that you’re going to be able to actually show me an apartment? I was nearly two hours into this ordeal and all I saw him do was look up a handful of apartments and make phone calls. I had no appointments to see anything. He told me that since my move in date is so late”^a1a” that he would need to give 24 hours notice to show me a place (this makes perfect sense, I wouldn’t want somebody showing my current apartment without giving me notice first).

I don’t want to completely denigrate Skeevish’s abilities here, but I’m 99.9% sure that given two hours and my own phone, I would have had at least one appointment to see a space, and I probably would have looked into more than 3 or 4 places.
Skeevish made it clear that we were done for the day and I made it clear that I had had enough of my time wasted by them and that I wasn’t going to have anything else to do with them. None of this would have bothered me if it hadn’t been for that interminable waiting period at the start of it all. But really, shouldn’t they have said something about coming in at a later date to make it easier to show me apartments? When I called to set up an appointment with Chicago Apartment People, they did. Let’s hope they are less lame.

1. this is due to his inability to understand what I meant when I said I wanted a mid August move in ideally. It meant that I would consider moving in on September 1 but that I would rather move in by August 15 or sooner. I would have clarified, but I was already beyond the pale when I realized he didn’t understand the English that I speak aaa