ME

ME

Friday, June 02, 2006

Verbal Trespassers will be Blacklisted

It’s happening again, the invasion of the disembodied vampires. Yesterday, mid-afternoon, the telephone rings and the hypnotic voice asks to speak to my beloved. I’m quite happy to inform him that she’s not here, in response to which he enquires, “when would it be convenient?” Now comes the moment of testing, as I cautiously enquire as to the identity of the caller.

My suspicion aroused that they may be out to suck money from us, for a service which we have neither requested nor require; the voice intones “Yorkshire Water – Home Services”, to which I reply that no time would be convenient, don’t they realize how ignorant it is to intrude on our time, our home and, utilizing the phone line for which we pay rental, for their commercial purposes.

The disembodied one explains that they have previously contacted my wife and, at this point, I’m struggling to prevent my language from becoming too colourful. I tell them that if my wife wished to contact them she would but, we are not in the habit of doing business over the ‘phone, or perhaps they’d be willing to permanently pay our line rental for the inconvenience they’re putting us through. I reminded him, in no uncertain terms, that they had indeed spoken to me and, that I told them then, that no time was convenient for them to phone. On that occasion, someone else from the same company ‘phoned at just the moment my wife had come through the door from work. My beloved tried to get rid of the nagging female vampire at the time but, out of frustration said that they could send us a quote!

We have no intention of changing our direct debits for the particular service (?) they were trying to coerce us into subscribing to, as we are quite happy with the current provider.

I’m afraid that their persistent telephonic irritations ensure that the quote they provided will never be viewed and, as far as I’m concerned, the less we have to do with Yorkshire Water – Home Services, the happier my life will be!

What had been a reasonable, though marginally de-energised, day was transformed by these trespassers into an evening of despondent irritability. Today, whilst Helen is out, the telephone has been left to switch to answering machine mode after a minimal ring. I’d like to be able to follow the maxim “Don’t let the buggers grind you down” but, unfortunately they do just that!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you know...how irritating!!!! Bleep bleep bleep!!! Blasted Toucan telecom called me yesterday from a stupid international call centre. by the time the pigion english speaking person had been on the phone for nearly 20 mins, I finally realised...duhh! that he was trying to get me to sign up for some cheesy phone tariff thing. I got so fed up in the end, I just started drifting into that mindless place of half comatose-ness, while I was trotting through my emails and checking other people's blogs etc., Eventually after he had blathered on extremely fast for about 25 mins, I just said good bye and hung up! How rude was that?..... but really, enough was enough. My brain was fried!