and so it begins again

So we have been rejected for the Surbiton flat. For the first hour of the conversation I had the listen to things like "well, you pass for your half of the rent, but your wife doesn't". This is said as if this is good news. It is also said based our having a joint account. This is not the first time we have to listen to these justifications. The bank has a similar approach. Even though either of us can physically walk into a branch and withdraw all of the money in our account, the debit cards which are attached to the same joint account have vastly different limits. The conversation with the bank is equally if not more inane.

After an hour, I finally convinced them to just run their numbers on the account as a whole, but we still fail. The formula is all based on employment income. Nothing else is matters. Here's another little tidbit I was told, "it doesn't matter how much money you have in the account because you could spend it tomorrow." Apparently I cannot spend my paycheck tomorrow. Apparently the promise of money not yet earned is better than money in hand. All they know is that I have a job and the salary at the time of the check. I could quit that job the next day, I could get made redundant (fired), the employer could go out of business, it could burn down, … But that promise of potential future earnings is better than money in hand. And before you construct a logical argument of why income is in fact better than savings, which I have done in my head already, no matter what result I come up with, it goes solidly against the brain dead reasoning I have been given the scores of times I have run into it and can only lead me to the conclusion that the purveyors of this system have no idea why they are doing it.

But the good news and bad news is that all of this changes with the wind. You can go into a shop and get the requirements for things like mobile phone plans or purchasing travel cards on national rail, then you can step back into the queue and get an entirely different answer from another employee. Or you can come back the next day and talk to the same employee and get a different set of conditions altogether. The rent at our current flat is twice that of the place we just got rejected for and we made even less at the time we secured it, and here we are.

But it still leaves you holding your breathe every time. And I really hoped that I would not have to go through this again. But now I have to dive again somewhere else.

Photo Credit: Peter Vidani Norman Farrell