Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 26: “Can you explain your career gap?”

[Previous chapter]

[The Airbnb: 2017 – 2020 (part-time)]

We must return for a while to The House on The Corner if we are to explain my last Job; which, Prospective Employer, you may or may not choose to interpret as the beginning of my Career Gap. After we moved to The Mill House in 2017 we kept the old house (and its crippling secondary, or arguably primary, mortgage) with the intention of listing it for sale once the economic uncertainty surrounding Brexit had ended. (Oh, sweet summer children…) We hoped that by letting the cottage out to Tourists who favoured The Landsker County as a travel destination, we could cover the Utilities and Mortgage—and maybe even make a modest Profit—for as long as local nationalists were willing to refrain from burning it down in response to if not quite in opposition to a perceived depletion of the local housing stock.

We contacted the Welsh Tourist Board and asked them to award us a Star Rating that we could use to market the house via The Internet. They visited to make their assessment and awarded us Three Stars, saying it could have been Four if the dining-room chairs had been heavier. We considered attaching weights to their legs (the chairs, not the people from the tourist board) but ultimately decided not to, because now that we thought about it we’d never noticed a Welsh Tourist Board Star Rating on anywhere we’d holidayed across the country. Indeed, it wasn’t immediately apparent what the process was for, except that it had been a requirement for acceptance onto the books of The Local Holiday Rentals Place, which Wife # 1 had identified as the First Port of Call for seeking Customers for our Holiday Let. The woman from The Local Holiday Rentals Place subsequently came over and took a lot of photographs of the house—which I’d already done. But while I went for a spare yet naturalistic approach, she insisted on putting loads of pretend plastic cheese on our dining table, and (incongruously) an open Delia Smith cookery book on the coffee table in the lounge; and on using an estate agent–style wide-angle lens which she thought might make our house look bigger than it was, which I couldn't help thinking could only lead to disappointment by Mismanaging Expectations. 

The Local Holiday Rentals Place turned out to be useless. The vast majority of their properties were in seaside locations, offering a standard, guaranteed, early-twentieth-century idyll of West Welsh Tourism. The House on The Corner, being in the middle of nowhere, was really more suited to young families wanting an active exploratory Holiday than it was to the sort of people who might want to book the former. We got one Proper booking from The Local Holiday Rentals Place, placed during the opening week, when The House on The Corner was in the featured section on the front page of their website. The holiday-makers were (I Googled them) a Conservative party councillor from The Marches, and his perennially disappointed wife. She complained that the house was too quiet, so I brought our digital radio over for her to use, and subsequently stopped listening to the “Today” programme on Radio 4 in the mornings because I never retrieved the radio from The House on The Corner, and couldn’t work out how to get Radio 4 on my phone. Never mind: John Humphrys, whom I mildly disliked, would be replaced in 2020 by Nick Robinson, whom I disliked marginally more; and by 2019 I would eventually re-learn how to watch the state broadcaster’s TV equivalent: “BBC Breakfast”, which would provide invaluable material for early-morning disgruntled tweets during The Pandemic, and beyond.

November can be pretty miserable in The Landsker County. And that first couple enjoyed their holiday in The House on The Corner so much that they returned to The Marches a day early, citing Work commitments. To be fair, The Local Holiday Rentals Place had charged more than we would ever dare charge anyone again—and over twice the sum that they would subsequently be able to command for us. In fact, the only other booking we got though their website was a heavily discounted midweek overnight stay booked by a solitary Polish engineer. He left a polite note in the visitors’ book, but otherwise there was no trace whatsoever of his visit. I’m not even convinced he slept there.

We were supposed to have given contractual exclusivity to The Local Holiday Rentals Place for the first year of lettings; but we soon listed The House on The Corner on Airbnb and Tripadvisor, because it was apparent that The Local Holiday Rentals Place had already given up on us. Once we’d listed the place on the websites that our Target Market actually used, bookings came in thick and fast. We were charging downwards of £50 a night to begin with—for a detached 3-bedroom house with a large garden and no neighbours—and we’d only very gradually work out, despite the websites’ aggressive race-to-the-bottom pricing strategy, that we could get away with charging at least double that for pretty much any time of the year when people actually wanted to go on holiday. Which was any time except November to February—excluding Christmas and New Year.

The role

Because Wife # 1, though still technically freelance, was working more-or-less full-time by now—for the couple of agencies that gave her regular Work—and I was almost solely occupied by Childcare and DIY, The Airbnb Job became my unofficial Part-Time Job for the three years that it lasted: a sort of de facto Career Gap. We put The House on The Corner on the market in November 2018, having let it out pretty successfully for a year. First with the local estate agent who sold us The Mill House. Then, after six months in which only a couple of people looked at it, we relisted it at a lower price with Purple Bricks. Because so few people wanted to view the house, the drawn-out process didn’t interfere much with my running it as A Holiday Let. Then again, our rates were relatively low and we maintained an occupancy rate in excess of 65% (well above average for lets in The Landsker County, according to my research) so a few people requested viewings of The House on The Corner only to be declined on the grounds that other people were busy being On Holiday in it. I reasoned that if people really wanted to buy it, they’d wait. And they didn’t. So they didn’t.

But my attempted selling of The House on The Corner was very much A Secondary Role to my Job of making sure the house earned enough through bookings from Airbnb and (to a much lesser extent) Tripadvisor in order to ensure that we didn’t go Bankrupt before we sold it. Thus, my Primary Role primarily involved “changeovers”: cleaning the house once people had left it, changing the bedsheets, doing the dishes and restocking the biomass boiler in the adjoining stone shed with wood-pellets. Actually, I had to do the boiler every couple of days, regardless of whether anybody had left. As such, The Airbnb Job constituted a return to the Menial Work I’d ostensibly left in my pre-graduation Youth. I’d never worked as a cleaner or housekeeper as such; but the majority of my Work between ages 18 and 21 had been in hospitality, so I had an idea what to expect. The Work would be more physically than mentally demanding. And as long as there were no customers present (which there wouldn’t be for the majority of the time) I could disengage my brain from the task at hand and consider philosophical or moral issues while listening to music or Radio 4—or the sound of the Henry vacuum cleaner, colloquially known (undoubtedly to the chagrin of both brands) as a Henry Hoover. 

Guests were supposed to check out by 10am, and they often didn’t. But I wouldn’t actually pull up in the driveway and engage in real-life contact with them unless it was gone eleven and thus absolutely necessary in order to have the place ready in time to not meet the incoming guests as well. New guests wouldn’t arrive till 2pm at the earliest (or weren’t supposed to) and even the messiest of guests wouldn’t leave the place in such a state that I couldn’t “change it over” in three hours. One woman from Brighton, who was thinking of moving to the area and thus used our house as a base from which to explore others, did leave rather a lot of broad-beans on the bedroom floor. But mercifully most people aren’t like that. There were two Polish couples who (upon my brief visit during their stay) seemed to have filled the house with black Labradors, and who left an unfathomable number of used condoms in the various bedroom and bathroom bins. There was also one couple who phoned me up on the first morning of their stay to complain that a mouse had eaten some couscous they’d left out on the side overnight. They insisted that I dropped what I was doing (DIY) to drive over there and look at the couscous. Once I’d done this and agreed that the mouse probably shouldn’t have eaten it, however tempting it might have been, I offered to put some new traps in the loft. (I’d evidently slackened off in the routine murder of rodents by this point in the Job.) The man one shook his head and said that the woman one simply could not sleep in a house in which she knew a mouse had recently eaten some couscous. So, faced with that unimpeachable logic and the child one trying to play with me at the same time his father was complaining about the rodent infestation, I apologized profusely and immediately issued a full refund from my phone. I wished them the best of luck with the rest of their holiday—wherever they chose to spend it. With some people, Prospective Employer, it really is best just to Pay The Danegeld. Once they’d left, I discovered upon clearing out the bathroom bin that at least one of them (probably the woman one) was currently menstruating. But I didn’t ask them whether this was a contributory factor to their decision to leave The House on The Corner and holiday elsewhere, because I didn’t care.

Back to the cleaning then. Assuming I’d done my prep and the cleaning cupboard was stocked properly, there would be three sprays to use: one general antibacterial spray for bannisters, door-handles, kitchen work-surfaces etc.; one stronger cleaning spray for the bathroom; and one glass-cleaner for windows, mirrors, and the shower screen door. We had two matching sets of Ikea sheets, so I could strip the beds and replace the covers before vacuuming, and we could do one set of laundry at home—which we’d have just enough time to wash and dry before another set of guests arrived, if they were on the shortest three-night cycle. We rarely let the place out for less than three nights, because the paltry income barely made it worth the hours required to get it ready again. I’d mop if there was time for the floor to dry before 2pm. If there wasn’t, I’d just use a cloth and a spray—or hot water on the wooden floor—in any areas that looked like they needed it. 

If the guests were all adult humans, it usually only took a couple of hours to clean—sometimes even less. But most of our guests tended to have kids or dogs or kids and dogs or even kids and dog kids; and any of those combinations tended to necessitate something closer to the four-hour maximum allotted time. I was only interrupted by arrivals once or twice in the entirety of the time I ran the place as a holiday-let, and on those instances only because people had arrived earlier than they were supposed to. I think I was pretty good at hiding my annoyance at being unnecessarily tasked with human contact. When contacted by phone or email to make a mid-stay appearance in my guise as handyman or boiler technician that was a different matter. Yes, I found these trips annoying too, but I recognized that they were very much a part of the Job. Our old house was a 20 minute drive away from our new (although older) house, and although the boiler had worked fine for the majority of the few years we’d lived there, once we started letting the place out to paying guests it intriguingly decided not to. 

So in my guise as handyman I had to perform a set of

[At 9:15am on Tuesday April 5, 2022, Chapter 26 was abandoned, never to be completed.]

[Concluding chapter]