Telecommunications

Time was having a landline phone was worth it. You know: cheaper than your mobile, you never know until you answer who might be on the other end, your grandma can call on Sunday evenings to hear you recount your life with all the rottenness censored in the hope of inspiring her to send funds, and you can put it on forms and look like a proper grown-up. At least that was what I expected from BT, but it seems that those days are long gone. Now, I answer the phone to computers more frequently than I do people, and when I do find a faltering human voice on the end of the line it is invariably a prospective customer for ‘Hot Colour,’ which is presumably a hairdressing establishment. Either their clientele are so consistently stupid that every seventh one can’t read and mash the keypad in the hope of getting the right number, or one of the employees recorded the number incorrectly in an ad or a sign, condemning me to a life of reception work when I had rather intended on spending the next three years writing a big, bizarre book on Shakespeare. Basically, I don’t know who to blame, but I do know that whoever they are they can’t read or write and they have no business interrupting my pyjama-clad mid-afternoon musings.

What finally drove me to begin posting on my long-dormant blog, however, was not some Tracy somewhere in desperate need of a touch-up on her ‘slices’ (whatever they might be), it was a dreadfully posh-sounding gentleman who wanted to speak to someone called Harriet O’Connor. I don’t know who Harriet O’Connor is. What I do know is that in my lumbering efforts to answer a phone call meant for her, I propelled my little toe into a doorframe so forcefully that now, two hours later, it is purple and throbbing and I can barely type through the excruciating pain. In a fit of empathy my little sister has sent me a photographic record of her own broken toe experience last summer. Little did she imagine that it would be appearing, in colour, on the interweb. That’ll teach her.