82. Cold Calling

I achieved a new personal best today – nearly 16 minutes!  I’d like to know if anyone can beat that.  

The phone rang.  I have Caller ID and it told me that this was an “International Call”.  

I get a call like this, mid-morning, virtually every day.  It is always someone whose first language is not English, calling me from an overseas call centre. 

Sometimes, it’s to try to get me to claim damages for an accident that they assure me, despite my protestations otherwise, I have had some time in the last three years.  

Occasionally, it is to tell me that I am definitely owed compensation for mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance that they insist I have bought in the last six years.

Mostly though, it’s someone who says that they're from BT and that as my IP address has been compromised, they need access to my screen to put it right.  They want to screen share.

I always seem to be at a loose end with nothing pressing to do when they ring and so I play a little game with them.  I try to keep them on the line for as long as possible.  Until this morning my record was a measly 2 minutes 42 seconds.

I do this for two reasons.  Firstly, I find it fun wasting their time and it’s a punishment for them bothering me.  

Secondly, I have altruistic reasons - the more time they spend with me, the less time they have to annoy anyone else and that includes you.

These callers are usually very good at spotting when I am deliberately dithering and prevaricating and as soon as they do, perfunctorily hang up. 

The gentleman who rang today must be very new to the job.  This a shortened version of what happened:

I answered the phone by saying, “Yes?”

There was silence but that often happens because I think that they must call several numbers at once and so I didn’t hang up.  

After ten seconds or so I turned on the loudspeaker and put the phone down on the arm of my chair.  More than a minute later I heard a voice saying, “Mr Davvis?”  

They struggle to pronounce ‘Dawes’ and as the phone account is in Caroline’s name, they assume that I am Mr Dawes.  I asked what he wanted.

“Can I ask you some questions?” he said.

“I expect so,” I replied, already realising that this was an opportunity not to be missed.

“What do you mean?” 

“Nothing,” I said, “but what’s in it for me?  Will you pay me for the time I spend answering your questions?”

“No but there are other rewards.”

“Like what?”  

“You will get to know about special offers and you won’t get unwanted phone calls.”

“What, like this one?”  He didn’t answer me but went on to say, 

“I’ll ask you some questions to complete a survey.  First of all, what kind of house do you live in?”

“A nice one,” I said, helpfully.

“Is it a bungalow, a semi-detached house, a detached house, an apartment, a flat, a maisonette or other?”

“What’s the difference between an apartment and a flat?” I asked him with genuine interest.

“An apartment is a suite of rooms in a building”

“So what’s a flat then?”  

“A flat is the British word for an apartment.”

“Do you know which country I live in?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“Then why mention an apartment?  Let’s hear them all again.”

“Do you live in a bungalow, a semi-detached house, a detached house, an apartment, a flat, a maisonette or other?”

“Yes.”  

This is the point I was sure he’d hang up but instead,

“What is the family income?”

“Before we go any further,” I said, “I hope you realise that I am trying to keep you on the line as long as possible because I know that this is an attempt at a scam.“

But, he didn’t hang up!  “What is the family income?” he repeated.

“That’s none of your business.”

“Is it less than £25,000?”

“No, much more.”

“More than £50,000?”

“Much, much more.  Seven figures.” 

“£500,000?”

“That’s not seven figures.  At least ten times more than that.”  Surely, he must have heard me giggle.

“How old are you?” he asked, after a short pause.

“That is none of your bloody business.”

“Older or younger than 21?”

“Yes I am.”

I was getting bored with this now and I couldn’t see how he would ever realise that I was deliberately wasting his time and so this could go on for hours.  He carried on.

“These are the last set of questions.  What is your occupation?”  

I thought for a few seconds of the most unlikely occupation I could come up with.

“I am a freelance assassin.”

“Do you ever have to travel overseas for your work?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you ever use Air India when you are travelling overseas for work purposes?”

“Only if my target is in India and I can’t get a seat with Cathay Pacific.”

“Would you like me to email you details of Air India’s special offers?”

“No.”  I had really had enough of this now.  “There’s someone at the door,” I said.  “I’m going to have to put you on hold.  I’ll be thirty seconds or so.”

I pressed the mute button and stared out of the window watching several birds pecking at my lawn.  I could hear him breathing and I watched the seconds and then the minutes passing on the screen of the phone.

Eventually, “Mr Davvis,” “Are you there, Mr Davvis?............... Mr Davvis?  Are you there please,” he bleated, plaintively.

“Thank you for taking part in this survey, Mr Davvis.  Goodbye.”

15 minutes 54 seconds.  Beat that!

81. Happy now?

I haven’t posted anything for 10 weeks, partly because I have had nothing to say but mainly because I am still trying to recover from the verbal onslaught I received from my wife after the last one was posted.

The day I posted Get a move on!, Caroline confronted me in the kitchen.

“Do you only post things that make me look stupid?” she demanded.

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“You made me seem like an idiot because I mistook the outside temperature for the speed that cruise control was set at.”

“Well you did and I thought it was funny.”

“And in, “Give me an L” she went on, “you wrote that I am embarrassing to be with in public; in Rural Stress,” she said, looking at a piece of paper that she’d made notes on, “you made me out to be tight and mean; in Calm down! you made it seem that both my sister and I are scatty and silly, while in Raspberries you showed me up as cruel and insensitive and that’s just going back to last September.  There are seventy before then that I can’t be bothered to look at.”

“Yes, but they were all written with love,” I said, a little uncomfortably.

“Why is it that you never write about the many, many times when you make a complete tit of yourself?” she demanded.

“Because I never do,” I said, uneasily.

“Huh!  What about that quiz show the other afternoon?”

“I was confused, that’s all,”

“No, you weren’t,” she scoffed.  “If I’d said what you did and made myself look a complete plonker, it would have been read by sheep farmers in Patagonia within minutes. Write about it, tell the truth and don’t alter it so you come out looking less of a pillock than you are.”

****

A couple of days ago Caroline came home early and caught me indulging in my secret vice – watching “The Chase”, an afternoon quiz show.

In one part of it, a contestant is asked a question and then given three possible answers, one of which is correct.  

The question could be, “What is the capital city of Romania?”  After a pause of a second or two, during which I tend to show off by shouting out the answer, three possible answers will appear:

BUCHAREST      PRAGUE      SOFIA

Caroline had sat down and was looking through some papers from work.  Unluckily for me, she looked up and paid attention to the programme just as the fateful question was asked.

“Which of these is a famous French impressionist?”

“How the hell would I know that?” I shouted at the television.  “I wouldn’t know a good impression of Nicolas Sarkozy from a bad one! Who is the French equivalent of Rory Bremner?”

Then up came,

EDVARD MUNCH   DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI   CLAUDE MONET

Happy now, Caroline?

80. Get a move on!

Caroline doesn’t seem to be very aware of the speed she is driving when she is behind the wheel of my car.  Maybe she is more conscious of her rate of progress when she drives her own car but twice now I have found her to be completely oblivious to the speed we are travelling when she drives mine.

The first time I knew of this problem was in September 2010.  I mentioned it in "Not Funny".  We were on an empty, dry, straight section of the M6 toll road very early on a bright Saturday morning.  Caroline was driving and I saw that the speedometer was showing just less than 110 mph.

“The manual says that this car will do a hundred and fifty five,” I said.  “Do you want to give it a try?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Caroline, “Even though it’s a toll road, there’s still a seventy miles an hour speed limit.”

We’ve just spent a week with Matthias and Joanna and their two boys in the Medoc region of France, northwest of Bordeaux.  Joanna is Caroline’s sister and yesterday we drove home from there to Wavendon. 

As it is 690 miles by road the journey took us nearly 15 hours and we took turns driving.  Although it was tiring, it was straightforward and there were no problems on the clear French autoroutes.

All was straightforward, that is, until the last 13 miles.  The last section of the M1 before our turnoff has been undergoing upgrades for the last decade or so and for no discernable reason there is still a 50mph speed limit.

We were crawling along on cruise control in the inside lane and vehicle after vehicle was going past us.  I was feeling weary and uncomfortable and wanted to get home.  I looked over at the speedometer and saw that it was set at about 35. 

“For God’s sake, speed it up!” I shouted.  “Why are you going so slow?”

“I’m doing 54,” Caroline said, icily.  She was obviously beginning to feel very tired too.

“No you’re not and how can you be so precise?”

“Because it says so there,” she snapped, jabbing her index finger at the dashboard.

“That’s the outside temperature,” I sighed, wearily.

“Oh, so it is.”

79. Give me an 'L'

In January2011 I wrote a piece titled “Discomfited?”.  In it I recalled the one or two times in my life when I have been embarrassed.  I’ve never been so embarrassed that I wished that I could just disappear.  Mostly, they have just been of the, “I didn’t really say/do/ that did I?” kind of thing.

Yesterday, however, something happened that could have been (and may still could be) unbelievably embarrassing.  I didn’t do anything and I certainly didn’t say anything.  Throughout the whole incident I was seated, still and silent.  But I blushed deeply and looked around feeling self-conscious and extremely uncomfortable.

Almost two years ago Caroline and I applied for Olympic tickets.  We knew it was a lottery and as neither of us have ever been successful in any kind of sweepstake, raffle or game of chance, and as we had heard that the demand for tickets was going to be huge compared with the supply available, we applied for as many as we were allowed.

On a Saturday morning many months ago we each sat with our laptops on our knees and went through the Olympic calendar making our application.  We both applied for two tickets for the same events.  

If we had been completely successful we would have become the lucky recipients of 80 tickets for twenty events and as we believed that we hadn’t the slightest chance of success, we applied for quite expensive seats too.  Why not?  We might just as well fail to get a £750 pound ticket as a £35 pound one.  After the application had been sent off I calculated that with a 100% success in our submission, we were looking at a bill for £24,000.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that we were not 100% successful but actually our rate was around 6%, which we thought was pretty good.

Yesterday we went to our first event – Beach Volleyball!

As I wrote in “Calm down!” in February this year, Caroline becomes wildly excited and enthusiastic very easily.  I can’t begin to imagine what she must have been like as a kid on Christmas Eve.  I doubt that she ever slept at all.  She could hardly sleep on Monday night and “We’re going to the Olympics tomorrow,” was the last thing I heard before I eventually got to sleep.

On Tuesday morning she was up very early and packing a rucksack with items that would cover every possible meteorological event.  No, not snowshoes but if it had been February and not July, they would be in there too (I’ve still got the shovel and coarse salt in the boot of my car from the very cold spell in December 2010).

We went to London by train and then got a cab from Euston to Horse Guards Parade where the competition is taking place.  On the train we sat in a ‘Quiet Zone’ carriage.  This means that using mobile/cell phones and personal stereos is prohibited and even though the carriage was almost full, nobody spoke and it was eerily quiet.

Quiet that is until Caroline’s bubbling excitement got the better of her and she suddenly blurted out, “We’re off to the Olympics.”  Forty people looked up from the books, newspapers and magazines they were reading and looked at her.  A lot of them smiled and Caroline beamed back happily.  I stared out of the window.

The temporary stadium at Horse Guards is a wonderful thing.  There is comfortable seating for 15,000 people and there are four lifts or elevators to get people like me, with mobility problems, to their places.  The soldiers on security duty were charming, funny and helpful while the uniformed volunteer helpers were desperate to be of assistance.

At 2:30 pm we were ready for the first game, which was between two men from Venezuela and two Latvians.

“Who do you want to win?” Caroline wanted to know.

“I’m not bothered.”

“I’m supporting Latvia because that nice waitress at the Cracked Conch in Cayman was Latvian,” Caroline told me.

You will almost certainly never have been to a Beach Volleyball event but let me tell you, it is different.  I suppose that according to my personal definition of a sport – if it can be done while smoking, drinking or sitting on a chair and it isn’t possible to work up a sweat, it’s not a sport - then beach volleyball is a sport.  But it is absolutely nothing like any sporting experience that you have ever been to.

The crowd is encouraged to be noisy and rowdy and if they ever go quiet they are yelled at and cajoled to shout, stamp their feet or clap in unison.  At certain points in the procedure the crowd is ordered (not asked) to stand up – and unbelievably they all do! 

Caroline joined in everything.  She clapped and she yelled.  She shouted, ”Olé,” after the trumpet call and she stamped her feet and hammered on the advertising board in front of our seats and at set point she stood up and did everything at once.

The television cameras were at Horse Guards yesterday and for all I know there was live coverage at the very time I became seriously embarrassed.

The crowd’s rendition of, “We will rock you,” had fizzled out.  A Latvian was about to serve.  Before the MC could exhort us to yell again like maniacs there was a fleeting moment of peace, quiet and calm.

That was the moment that Caroline chose, in front of 15,000 people and the world’s press, to yell at the top of her voice those three little words that I am sure she had never previously even thought of saying and I am fairly certain she will never say again, let alone bellow at full volume.  Those three words that were heard all round Whitehall and could possibly have also been heard in China, Lesotho, Bhutan and Russia:

“COME ON LATVIAAAAAAAA!!!!!!”

78. Rural Stress

In March this year we moved out of London and into the country.  We have swapped the bustle of outer London suburbia for the seclusion of rural Buckinghamshire.  We are out-of-the-way here but not isolated.  We are just an hour from North London by car and only twenty-five minutes from Central London by rail.

It is very quiet here except at dawn when the noise from the birds is almost overwhelming.  There is one wood pigeon that really annoys me.  He (it’s probably male) is tone deaf.  He just cannot sing in tune and I find it so intolerable that once he starts, just before five o’clock every morning, I am awake and so irritated that I can never get back to sleep.  

The basic wood pigeon call – they don’t sing – consists of four notes with the fourth one dropping to be the lowest of them.   Once a wood pigeon starts to call it will repeat the sequence for up to an hour.  It can be quite soothing.

The tone-deaf pigeon that keeps me awake calls in a monotone and produces four notes of equal and yet somehow discordant pitch over and over again.  Imagine your favourite tune, a melody that you’ve heard countless times and love, being massacred by a rubbish singer.  That’s what I have been suffering every morning for the last two months.  You see?  It’s not all peace and tranquility out in the country.  There are stresses here too.

We were lucky when we lived in Winchmore Hill that we were only 72 paces away from one of the best Indian restaurants in London.  Just after we had settled in Wavendon we were driving through a neighbouring village and saw a restaurant called “Little India”.  As 'Friday Night is Curry Night' we thought we'd give "Little India" a trial and so we turned up the next evening.

“Would you like drinks while you look at the menu?” asked our waiter as he showed us to our table.

“No but could we have two poppadoms please,” I said.

“I’m sorry sir but we don’t serve poppadoms,” the waiter said, very apologetically.

“No poppadoms!  I’ve never heard of an Indian restaurant that doesn’t serve poppadoms.”

“Neither have I sir.  This is a Thai restaurant.”

Both Caroline and I always try to support local businesses.  Last Christmas we agreed that every present we bought would be from a shop within walking distance of our house.  It all worked out very well although I must say that I was surprised to be given a pair of size 6 trainers that were too small for me but luckily they were exactly the right size for Caroline.

In recent years when I called a local tradesman I usually got through to a Rumanian, a Pole or some other Eastern European who had recently arrived in the UK.  They all had several things in common:

1 They all answered their phone and if they didn’t would respond very quickly to any message I left.

2 They all turned up to give an estimate or to commence work at the time and on the day they said they would. 

3 Work done was always completed by the time they promised and was always of a high standard.

4 Their prices were always reasonable.

5 They were all reliable, pleasant and honest.

There don’t seem to be any Eastern Europeans living in North Buckinghamshire.  Now, whenever I call a local plumber, an electrician, a gardener or a carpet fitter, the phone is answered (if he can be bothered) by an Englishman or in the case of the gardener, an Englishwoman although she would probably describe herself as an English Lady.

We bought a new carpet for our living room.  The fitter who came was moaning that he only had two days work that week because people weren’t buying carpets.  “That’s like having a sixty per cent pay cut,” he told me.  I told him that I could help him out as I had a piece of carpet I’d brought with me from London that I’d like him to fit.  He agreed to do it and took my number.  A week later he still hadn’t rung.  I found someone else to do it.

Our boiler has been temperamental ever since we moved in.  Eight days ago it finally stopped working altogether.  I phoned three plumbers before one of them answered his phone and then he failed to arrive to carry out his inspection in order to provide a diagnosis. 

Eventually, after numerous further calls, a plumber came and told us that the pump had seized up.  That was three days ago and since then, despite the assurances he gave me that the work would soon be done we have heard nothing from him.

After several failed attempts this morning I suspected that he was recognising my phone when I rang him and was choosing for whatever reason, not to answer.  I tested my theory by using Caroline’s phone.  He answered straight away.  I said nothing but I hung up on him and now I’m looking for someone else.

The “Lady Gardener” whom I rang turned her nose up at the work I was asking her to do.  “That’s just garden maintenance,” she sneered, haughtily.  “I’m a horticulturalist.  Find a man.”

Those who have turned up to give an estimate don’t appear to be particularly honest either.  “Here’s my number,” a representative from a garden maintenance firm said to me, handing me a scrap of paper.  “Whatever price the company quote you, I’ll do it for twenty per cent less.”

An electrician from a local company tried the same ploy.

The country is said to be in recession.  I’m doing my bit.  I’m trying to stimulate growth and provide employment but I can’t do it without help and assistance.  I am totally disillusioned and fed up with English workers.

There are Polish plumbers but none of them are Liquid Propane Gas certified and that’s what I need because we are not on mains gas supply.  Also, after eight days I need a bath but that’s not something you really need to know about.

10:55 p.m. 5½ hours after posting.

I’ve had a comment from Fiona telling me that Wavendon is not in the country but is part of Milton Keynes.  She went on to tell me that in her town of “7,000 souls” there is a Corgi Registered plumber and two doors down is the local butcher.  Across the street is a great builder, who is related to a plumber and a plasterer. Opposite him is a roofer and at the bottom of the hill she has a really good Indian with takeaway service where I can get a curry that serves 3 (inclusive of poppadoms and pickle tray) for £11.

Well Fiona, so what?  I don't know where you live but those are the services I’d expect in a town of 7000 people but Wavendon isn’t a town.  It isn’t even a village.  As it has no services at all – no shops or a post office – it is technically a hamlet.  It has a population of about 700.  It is surrounded by farmland some five miles from Milton Keynes centre and 2 miles from the town boundary.  Our house is a mile further out of Wavendon towards Apsley Guise and a mile and a half from the nearest shop which is in Woburn Sands.  We are Milton Keynes only in as much as we have a MK post code but then so does Olney (where the annual pancake race is held) and no one would ever call Olney a part of Milton Keynes.  By her reasoning Chalfont St Peter is a part of Slough as it has a SL postcode.

But anyway that wasn’t the point of my blog.  My point is that here at least, tradesmen don’t seem to want to work.  At a time when nationally we are told that times are hard, I am finding it almost impossible to get some of the work done.  In London the recently arrived, skilled migrants were desperate to be offered work and when they were, they did it efficiently, ably and promptly.