Quote 3 of 13

From Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, by Kate Fox

When I asked people to account for their aversion to estate agents,
the responses were vague, inconsistent and often contradictory: estate
agents were ridiculed as stupid and incompetent 'twits', but also
reviled as sly, grasping, cunning and deceitful.  Finding it hard to
see how estate agents could manage to be simultaneously dim-witted and
deviously clever, I eventually gave up pressing for a rational
explanation of their unpopularity, and tried instead to look for clues
in the detailed mechanics of our interactions with them.  What
exactly do estate agents do?  They come to inspect your
house, look around it with an objective eye, put a value on it,
advertise it, show people round it and try to sell it.  What is so
terribly offensive about that?  Well, everything, if you replace the
word 'house' with 'identity', 'personality', 'social status' or
'taste'.  Everything that estate agents do involves passing judgement
not on some neutral piece of property but on us, on our
lifestyle, our social position, our character, our private self.  And
sticking a price tag on it.  No wonder we can't stand them.  By making
them the butt of our jokes and scorn, we minimize their power to hurt
our feelings: if estate agents are universally agreed to be stupid,
ineffectual and insincere, their opinions and judgements become less
meaningful, their intrusions into our private sphere less traumatic.
		-- p. 124

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