To think this wasn't right

[peachesandclean]

I just got back from a weekend break with my family (8 of us in all) and we stayed in a large house with a hot tub in the garden.

My sister and I (both early 20s) were in the hot tub sunday afternoon and the owner came in through the garden and told us he was coming to do the chemical check for the hot tub, we were in our cozzies so naturally felt a little uncomfortable that this man we had never seen before had just arrived and came and did that. We asked him if he needed us to get out and he said no so we just sat in the hot tub not knowing what to say whilst he did it. The rest of our family was out sightseeing whilst all this was happening. He was quite unfriendly and blunt with us and the whole encounter was a bit awkward.

We told our family when they got back and they were annoyed on our behalf saying that he should have come back later once he'd seen we were in it, or asked if it was okay for him to do the test. All in all it felt rather invasive.

I get that it's his house and he can do whatever he likes but to me when you're paying someone to stay in their house, surely there should still be some sort of boundaries? Luckily it didn't ruin the weekend but it has left me wondering about what is morally acceptable in situations like these

We rented a place in Edinburgh once, big ole posh house and we had the ground floor. Owner kept trying to come round with tradespeople - measuring windows, checking plumbing etc - while we were having dinner. Told them to go away - very nicely. Then they asked us up for 'drinks' wtf, on a family holiday, not wanting to have drinks with random strange people - cowardly, said I had a tummy ache.

@Eckhart

But WeBuiltCisCityOnSexistRoles - they didn't set any boundaries. They sat silent and waited for him to leave. He didn't know they minded at all. From the look of the thread, there's many people who wouldn't have minded, so it's not too unreasonable an assumption for him to make.

Are you kidding? You can't be that clueless, with SO little emotional intelligence?

I despair of this place sometimes.

@littlehandyhippo No, I'm not kidding. And yes, I imagine that I'm equally clueless and emotionally unintelligent as the rest of the posters here who think it was a bit invasive and nothing more. But thank you for the direct, personal criticism.

OP has said very clearly she felt uncomfortable. Sadly, the exact reason she didn't feel able to say anything is because we live in a society that would respond to her the way this thread (mostly) has.

The reactions of belittling her feelings and dismissing her concerns are just as depressing as the very beginning of this situation - a man who feels he is entitled to just enter a woman's private space she is renting with no notice, when she is a state of undress, without even thinking he should ask.

This is why things need to change, and this is why this thread is so fucking depressing.

(The reason why she didn't say anything to him at the time I mean)

The pool checking person may well have behaved in precisely the same way had there been men/nobody in the tub. There are many women on this thread who would not have minded the intrusion. This is not necessarily an issue of sexism. Yes, of course there are issues of sexism in society. This doesn't mean that we can condemn one person for one action with the assumption that its root was in sexism.

We also still don't know if it was in the contract that someone may come daily to test the tub. It often is, and I hope it was.

Haven't read whole thread but we have a hot tub and chemical checks should be done weekly although we don't. Absolutely no need for him to have done one when you were even in the property, let alone actually using the thing.
Weird.

My post was more focusing on questioning the etiquette of something like this
Bollocks was it.

Wouldn't have bothered me. We had the pool guy come round a couple of times to the villa we rented in Spain this summer, he just let himself in, sign languaged what he was there for to me as I lay on a sun lounger, and got on with it. Would I have preferred him not to have been there? Yes. Did I feel slightly weird lying there in my cossie with a strange man? Yes. Was it necessary? Yes. So I put up with it.

Whenever we have stayed in holiday let's with hot tubs, the water has always been tested daily, usually early morning, but most of the places we stay are small sites with a local owner, so we accept that they may come at another time. I wouldn't want to stay somewhere that only tested the water once a week, ewww!