Last Tuesday morning, a dozen people walked into my apartment while I was in the shower. If you take one step inside the door of my apartment and turn your head to the right, you are looking straight into the shower. It was pure luck that that morning the bathroom door was more closed than open and they didn’t actually see me. I normally don’t bother closing doors since I live alone.

It was also pure luck that I wasn’t singing at the time. I normally sing in the shower, but it just so happened that I was brushing my teeth the moment they walked in.

The dozen people were real estate agents. My apartment is up for sale at the moment and the company selling it does what they call a caravan, where all their agents go and look at the new listings or upcoming auctions. It generally happens on a Monday morning, but it had been canceled three times before (usually with little or no notice given to me). After they canceled the previous Monday, she mentioned contacting me to reschedule for the following week but they never did. And since they hadn’t contacted me, and Monday was a public holiday, I’d figured it would be the following week instead.

What I didn’t expect was them to just walk into my apartment at 10:30am on a Tuesday morning. I have the only key to the property, so they’d convinced the hotel staff that they had permission to be there and to let them in. And to give them some credit, at least when they realised I was there, they backed out the corridor again. I told them to give me two minutes to get dressed but they couldn’t wait that long and left.

To be fair, they had tried to call me at 8:30 that morning but my phone was flat. When I woke up on Tuesday I’d put it on charge and then got in the shower, so didn’t get the missed call messages until too late. But not being able to reach me, they apparently decided to just come on in anyway.

Everything about this process of selling my apartment has lowered my opinion of real estate agents (if that was at all possible).