Utter f*cking c*nting b@starding cock nobbers!

(long one here, skip to "5th person" if you want to avoid the pre-rant-rant)

I just f*cking hate sonsabitches sales people and their dirty b@stard tactics. I thought I'd seen it all having bought a few cars over my years, and having to deal with estate agents, but all I want is a f*cking conservatory. I mean is that too much to c*nting ask!? Ok, so it's a little different (needs to be made out of wood and stone rather than bricks and uPVC), but still, either you can do the job or you can't.

I'm now certain that I've spoke to *every* single possible supplier of wooden conservatories, (I'm not exaggerating, there's not many of them), and I can confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, they're all f*cking lying ars£hat donkey lovers. This has been going on for 6 months now but last night really topped everything off.

1st person we deal with: Only supply woodgrain uPVC, we checked it out and it looked pretty nice. We explained that we were grade2 listed so were only allowed wood, but they assured us that woodgrain PVC was allowed so we spent £400+ getting the plans drawn up. Only to have them rejected by the council. GAH! The b@stards now don't want to know. Ok, we're committed, we'll just find a supplier of wooden conservatories.

2nd person we deal with: Back in January. Came in with a reasonable quote. We needed a window replacing, so we gave him that job to do first and said if all is well he'll get the job of the conservatory too. It's now nearly August, we still have no window, but he still has our deposit. Mother f*cker. So he's not getting the job for obvious reasons.

3rd person we deal with: Crazy Irish guy, gave us a silly priced quote. We told him it was too high, knocked 40% off, there and then. I mean, f*ck right off! You just tried to shaft us for nearly £8000 and you want me to trust you with building something on to our house. Get out of here, now.

4th person we deal with: Local supplier, seemed ok. Reasonable quote. About to go ahead, and they're no longer in business. Looking on the bright side, close call for us as it happened before we handed over a deposite, but still... GAH!!

5th person - national company. Talked the talk, the samples looked superb, price was a little high, put that down to them being a national company. Managed to get them down to within budget after a weeks worth of haggling and making minor alterations to the plans. All is well, sign contract, pay deposit... which leads us on to person number 6...

6th Person - phone us up saying "Hi Mike, it's Stuart here, you contacted us a while ago about a conservatory, I'm just phoning to see if you're still interested in a quote". Me, thinking that it was my missus who'd spoken to them "Ah, sorry, we've actually just put a deposit down with another company". Him "Oh, mind if I ask who?". I tell him and then he launches into a schpiel of slagging this national company off, basically saying that he knew that they wouldn't be able to do the job for the price they'd quoted, and that they'd just agreed on the price to boost up their month end figures. "Fook", thinks I. This actually matches up with some worries I had about previous discussion with this company. Anyway, I basically arrange to have this guy out and give us a quote just in case it does all fall through.

They come over (the guy on the phone and then one of his colleages who used to work for this national company), spend over 2 hours at our house (like all of these b@starding companies seem to do), slag off the national company, give us a quote, which is reasonable in price and say give us a call if it all falls through with the national company. So they leave, eventually, and I go to make a brew. I notice that he's left his folder there... so I give him a call, trying to catch him before he gets too far away, and let him know. "Bugger" he says. He'll pick it up tomorrow.

So, being a nosey git I flick through... and I'm glad I did! It contained lots of pictures of conservatories, but underneath their stickers... was the logo of this national company. Nice one, this sales person is still using his pitches from this other company. But... then I dig a little deeper and find a multipage report entitles "(national company's) customer situation portfolio". It was basically a document listing all of this other company's potential customers, and what these f*cking monkeys were doing was calling up people from this list, slagging off the national company, then trying to get the business themselves. Utter c*nting tw@ts. We were ready to go ahead and if they hadn't left this folder we would've been conned, royally.

I've taken photographic evidence of the folder and the documents, but I'm not certain what I'll do with it yet (open to advice and opinion here). I really don't want to let them get away with this sort of thing, but by the same token I don't want to endanger my family by shopping in a couple of scumbags (I don't fancy any sort of retalliation).

As it turns out there appears to be some truth in what they said about this national company's dodgy tactics (thanks to reviews on the internet) so they're out anyway, and we're still without a builder. GAH!

You know, these types (and by "types" I mean "anyone to do with the purchase/sale of property - and yes, that does include Howard; he's in adverts for Halifax, who provide mortgages - therefore he dies horribly /taps temple/ always fucking thinking) will be first against the wall anyway, and it won't be long before we put our plans in motion, so before doing anything I'd maybe give it -

/Checks watch

Maybe give it about -

I've said too much.

FUCK YOU UBISOFT

Blimey Mike, that's a right royal pain in the arse you've got there. My parents had problems getting a conservatory built too. One guy, who they'd used for 20 years for their double glazing, clearly thought he was s hoe-in for the job and over priced them by about £5k. When they told him he was out, he dropped the price immediately. Sorry mate, should have thought of that before. Even the guy they did get soon started to trying to cut corners, once he'd got some cash out of them. Luckily the old dear doesn't suffer fools gladly!

Edit: How did they get hold of this info anyway?

Anyway, 8 grand? Fuck that. Build it yourself. How hard can it be? Bit of glass, bit of wood - bosh. What's all the fuss, hey? Charging the fucking earth for a glorified see-through fucking wendy house, the wankers. Fuck them. I wish I'd thought of this before recently buying a house, I tell you.

/Remembers his attempts at a bird house in wood work

Okay, maybe not then.

FUCK YOU UBISOFT

I'm guessing that they're giving back handers to a member of staff in return for a report of all pending sales, at which point they poach the business.

I want to act on this, I'm just not sure how. Contacting the CEO of the national company may be an option... I'm also tempted to call the other people on the list and warn them!

I would guess (and purely guessing)

That the guy either still works for, or only recently left the national company. And that was his customer list for follow ups or some such.

Phoning said national company and letting them know (annonymously) would probably see them shut down rather quickly.

Oh yeah, that might be a good shout as well.

although are you also going to tell them of your reservation about the National Company?

£8 grand was how much they overpriced us by... the total cost was a lot more. It's not a small one (5.5m by 3.5m, made of wood and real stone) so it's not cheap. But it's not a license to shaft us either.

The guy has been trading with this new company for a while. And he wouldn't have got our details from Saturday anyway! Nah, I'm certain that either this national company is doing something dodgy, or he's still got access to their systems, or (most likey) he's getting the info from someone he still works with.

Sell the story to a paper, you might be able to fund some of the conservatory with it :)

Winner!

Or how about Trading Standards/Federation of Master Builders or another ombudsman if you don't want to go down that route?

LOL! :o)

Who is the national company? I can find out their directors and stuff if you want to snitch on this fuckpiece

One email coming your way Mr Pete.

/Couldn't afford a 1 foor x 1 foot conservatory

:(

But then this is a (shitty) council house so I couldn't anyway!

Shitty crap, though, Mike. Gah.

Might I suggest inviting them all over to your gaff at once and then building a '300'-style wall of stone and corpses?

Talking of Utter f*cking c*nting b@starding cock nobbers, did you ever get that lead from slurpy?

Wow. o_O

Great read, although I do feel sorry for you.

I can only sympathise Mike. We had a similar experience when getting our double-glazing last year. The salesman from one company came up with a £10k figure, which we baulked at. He then did some sums on his calculator and said he might be able to get it down to just over £7k. Then he had to go to the car for a sample frame and left his calculator - the same model I've got - in the house. There's a button on there which brings up the previous answer, so I had a quick look. '9999999999999'.

Genuine lol. You'd think these people would be more careful when trying to scam someone.

No lead turned up. Although two have been sent apparently. All I want now is the tracking number of the one he sent so that I can figure out exactly what's gone one.

Yeah, you'd think they wouldn't leave stolen contact details at peoples house.

And you think that'd they'd pick them up again if they did. They'd not been around to collect them today.

Sounds like you've had a load of messing about that you could have done without.

Just a point of law though, if someone from within the national company has been feeding this information to a third party to steal the custom surely that's a Data Protection Act violation as well as it being a really scummy thing to do?

It is. I spoke to the DPA officer at work today. Yes, the data shouldn't have got out and yes they would be liable. However, as it's likely this data was stolen it's unlikely that the information commissioner can/will act. Plus I don't blame this company if the data was stolen, there are limits to what you can do to prevent that.

I'm still feeling the situation out at the mo, but the chances are I'll contact this national company just out of curiosity to see how they'd react.