Hello...This is Earth Calling.

The joys of dealing with estate agents. You'd think that finding somewhere to rent would be easy enough wouldn't you. Call me naive but I thought you would pick up the phone and just tell someone what you are looking for and then they would tell if they have it or not. Preferably, if not, then they would try to help you find it.

Wrong. The first call I made was answered by a very nice lady, who suggested that I look on their website, if anything appealed then I could call them and make an appointment to view. Simple I thought, after an eternity for their website to load, the search facility wasn't working and that's the only way to access their list of properties. Ok onto the next agent. No answer. The next, slight improvement, this one had an answer machine, and so it went on, either an answer machine, 'could we direct you to our website', or just no response.

No one actually wanted to talk to me. But what on earth are they all doing to be so busy that they can't talk to a potential customer? They are not updating their websites, half of those I visited were out of date, and the other half couldn't tell their a**e from their elbow, when you type Yorkshire into a search field call me picky but you don't expect to get Blackburn, Oldham or Durham. They are not on the telephone with customers, I'm one, and they are definitely not busy picking up their messages. I left at least half a dozen yesterday morning and not one has phoned back.

So here I am again about to embark on another morning of trawling and calling, after pretty much losing the will to live yesterday, I don't hold out much hope for today. Has there been some kind of plague that nobody told me about, or maybe it's triffids... Hello, this is earth calling is there anybody out there?