Office building seizes my property

Today has been a long day. I have mentioned before that I’m departing my new rented office (I’ll write another post as to why later). Back when I leased the office I paid 2 months deposit along with a months rent in advance. Last week I tried to notify them that I no longer require the office. The office that handles the building have been putting me off from speaking to the guy I’m supposed to discuss this with for weeks now. I’ve had all kinds of excesses such as he’s in Singapore, in meetings, not in the office etc. etc. When we asked for his mobile number to contact him direct, they say they don’t have his number. We even went round to this guys office to get this sorted out!

Today marks the end of the month and I decided the best thing to do was to pack up and go as our new office is now ready. This is where things get interesting. We called the office building and basically said that we’ve been trying for weeks to get this sorted to no avail and we are now leaving. Someone at office building said that we could not move anything out of our office until we spoke to this guy who we need to talk too although they could not confirm when we would get the chance to speak to him. We mentioned that we’ve been trying but they still wouldn’t have any of it. We called back this afternoon for one last chance and told them we are moving out today, unless we can have some understanding of how they work. The lady at the office then went into a fiddle and said something along the lines of “You can’t move out until we find someone else or you find someone else, we will keep your property for deposit”

As there is nothing like this in my 400 page agreement so after I heard this I was determined to get my stuff out of there as quickly as possible: I told everyone to turn off their computers, pack them up and walk them round to my apartment. One door lady tried to pull me aside but I kept on walking. It was stupid, everyone felt like they were stealing something when actually this is our own property.

The next mission was the desks, chairs and fridge. In order to take big items out of the office you need to obtain a certificate from the office so that security on the basement floor know that everything is kosher.  I knew we were not going to get one so I went ahead anyway and got someone with a car to come round after working hours to load the stuff on the truck. Within a minute there must have been 10+ security guards… it was obvious they were expecting us. After a few hours of trying to negotiate we had to leave the office for the night without the desks, chairs and fridge.

There’s not many times when I hate the Thai system, although this really does rub me up the wrong way. It’s my stuff, we have tried for weeks to sort this out but we are just not moving anywhere. This is going to delay everything as now no one can work.

If this was in England, I would have just pushed the security to one side and walked on, however my Thai staff confirmed that if I did that, there would be a good chance of us receiving a black eye or two.

I haven’t got a clue what’s going to happen and I’m pissed. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.