I am today's "crazy woman" story --

My J and I are house-hunting. My mom is also looking for a place for my brothers. She was going to look at some units available in Prince David along Katipunan and I decided to tag along to check them out also.

We were told that the key to the unit would be with the guard. When we got there, we made inquiries with the guard and the guard told us the key was with the admin office.

The guard gets my ID and gives me a visitor pass and then opens the door that leads to the stairs and tells me to go down the admin office. I proceeded down the stairs and checked each floor for the admin office and couldn't find it. I had gone straight through to the third-level basement (where it was really poorly-lit and scary) without finding the damned office.

The stairs system to the basement of Prince David is very odd -- it's one way down and then you exit and go through a different door to go up. On my way up, I couldn't get any of the doors open -- I reached the 2nd floor stairs (from Basement Level 3) and that's where I exited. I went back to the lobby to inform the guard that I couldn't find the admin office and requested that she have the key brought up to the lobby. She told me that the procedure was to have people proceed to the admin office to get the key there. I then asked to speak to the building manager but he refused to talk to me -- from what I could hear from his conversation with the lobby guard, he seemed annoyed that I got lost and was asking me to go down again. At that point I just asked if they could someone to accompany me down to the office.

A guy comes in from the elevator to bring me to the admin. I was already opening the door to the stairs and the guy pushes the button to the elevator. Of course I knew that the elevators go all the way down but I had to act ditzy just to get my point across. I told the guy that I wasn't aware that I could take the elevator down and I wondered out loud why they had me take the scary stairs.

The elevator took a while. As an act of spite, I told the guy that we should take the stairs going down to their office. When we got there, the manager rudely asked me what my business was with the unit I was looking at and I told him that I was a prospective buyer. I asked him why people had to go through that to look at units and he told me it was a security measure.

It's a valid reason -- but it's bad service. I don't think you should drag prospective clients to the nether regions of the basement to get a key. I don't think it's a good business practice to direct prospective clients to go down a scary stairwell to an office that isn't marked or visible. I thought it was bad form for admin people to take the elevator when they let prospective clients take the stairs.

(And to think they get a commission from the sales -- they really should treat people better.)

The manager then asked the guy who brought me down to escort me to the unit. Siyempre, guy pushes button of elevator again. Siyempre, spiteful me tells him that we should take the stairs.

I didn't like the unit -- which added to my annoyance, considering all the trouble and rudeness I had to put up with. My mom and I had a few more units to look at, but the people who owned the units were a bit late. So I was there, sitting at the lobby of Prince David swearing in a mix of Chinese and English.

There were some people who were also at the lobby -- they probably couldn't understand what I was saying, but they could understand the sentiment. I didn't even try to hide my annoyance.

I was in a bad mood na, so I decided to get a drink at Seattle's Best. That made me feel better. During the time I was gone, my mom asked our yaya to go to the admin to asked for the key of another unit that she found out was also available. The same thing happened to my yaya -- she went all the way down to the bottom and went back up to the lobby.

The bright side? I didn't know I could be that fluent in Chinese.

The other bright side? The two other units happened to be gems.

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I want a copy of this! --

Eros, three films by three directors -- two of whom I love: Stephen Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai (the third director is Michelangelo Antonioni).

Here's the Yahoo! Movies page on this movie.