An unwanted and unexpected sales call

A while ago I was approached and offered a free raffle ticket with the chance of winning a brand new shiny car, so, like a fool I accepted, on the promise that my details would not be used for any commercial purpose.

Last week Douglas got a call from someone in relation to this, saying we had "gone through to the next stage" and as a result we had won a free carpet clean of one room in the house. Great! we thought. The hall stairs and landing carpet could do with a nice deep clean!

The carpet clean was booked in for yesterday at about 6pm. We expected someone to come in, clean our carpet, probably leave their details and how much it would cost for other carpets to be cleaned, then leave.

Oh.. how wrong we were.....


Three smartly dressed very polite blokes turned up and introduced themselves, bringing with them two large boxes which contained the vacuum cleaner.

Two of them stayed, the Boss going who knows where (maybe to supervise other teams?) The two blokes proceeded to unpack and set up the many many many attachments of their shiny Kirby Cleaner, and talk us through the uses of all of them.. long bits.. small pokey bits.. brushy bits.. you name it, this machine had them!

One hour passed.. demonstration continued…

One and a half hours passed.. we were getting distinctly conscious of how much of our evening this was eating up, so we were delighted when the carpet cleaning bit arrived… however..

The bloke cleaning the carpet didn’t have a proper dust collection bag, only a demonstration attachment that fed the dust/dirt through to a white paper filter to show (and shock) the customer at what had been collected. These filters only collected a small amount of dust/dirt before having to be replaced.

Mr Kirby Hoover/Carpet Cleaner came in to the lounge every 45 seconds or so with yet another bloomin white paper disc. Throughout the presentation these were laid out all over our lovely new cream lounge carpet L By the time we were thoroughly fed up of the whole process, the discs looked like some new Tracey Emin exhibition “Dust from those carpets I have ever slept with” lol.

One and three quarter hours passed.. and we politely told the guys to wrap it up, only do the bottom of the hall carpet and leave us in peace without doing the shampoo etc.

They didn’t take long after that to click onto the fact that no, we were not going to buy their incredibly expensive equipment, packed up with an unpleasant “well if you are happy living with all that dirt” comment and.. thank goodness..

Left.

Phew.

We have both learnt a salutatory lesson - you dont get something for nothing from a slightly dodgy raffle ticket :-)