Forever Amber

Why must people keep knocking my door all the time? If it’s not men wanting to know whether I want my driveway mono-blocked (Yes I do, but I don’t want to pay for it, so go away) or kids selling tablet, it’s people telling me that, hey, looks like my windows are about to cave right in, so it’s lucky they were in the area because their dad just happens to have a double-glazing firm, and they could totally cut me a deal right then and there!

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, people, LEAVE ME ALONE. Can you not see I’m busy looking at shoes I can’t afford on the internet doing my important work? Can you not HEAR how crazy my dog gets every time you set so much as ONE TOE on my non-monoblocked driveway (hey, maybe I should… Nah, forget it.), the sound sending him into the kind of hysterical rage that it takes us HOURS – well, minutes, anyway – to bring him down from?

Also: people who are collecting for charity? You knock on my door one more time late at night with your pious expression and your talk of how you need to take all of my money for "the chyyyyldren" and I’ll set my dog on you, m’kay? And bearing in mind the fact that we haven’t had any mail since Rubin rounded up the postman that time, believe me, that is not an idle threat. I will decide when and how I give to charity. ME. Not you. So don’t even think about disturbing me in my important work to try and guilt-trip me into handing over a bunch of cash. What are you, highwaymen?

Anyway, I don’t keep cash in the house. (Actually, I don’t keep cash in the bank, either. I keep my cash in the form of shoes, in my wardrobe. And that;s how I like it.) I’m like the Queen that way. The only way you’re getting money off me is if you start taking Visa. And even then you’re not getting any money off me because I DON’T HAND OUT MONEY TO TOTAL STRANGERS WHO KNOCK ON MY DOOR LATE AT NIGHT, CAUSING MY DOG TO HAVE A CONNIPTION AND DISTURBING ME IN MY IMPORTANT WORK.

I will take some of that tablet, though.

P.S. Just speaking of Rubin, he finally decided to get his paw out and start updating his blog again, and today he has taken the lazy bloggers route by posting a short video clip of himself. You should go see. Oh COME ON, people, it’s a freakin’ TALKING DOG, what more do you want?

P.P.S He doesn’t actually talk in the video though. Just thought I should make that clear in order to manage your expectations effectively. He only talks to special people, know what I mean?

You know what I hate? What I really, really hate? Telemarketers who not only call me up to try and sell me stuff when I’m a member of the Telephone Preference Service, but telemarketers who HANG UP ON ME without another word the second the words "Sorry, I’m not interested," come out of my mouth. I mean, seriously, that’s just rude, isn’t it? Did their mothers never teach them how to close a call professionally? DO THEY SLEEP WELL AT NIGHT?

The latest offender was a Chinese restaurant in our town, who, seeing as they weren’t ashamed to slam the phone down on me as soon as I politely declined their offer of having my business featured on their menu, presumably won’t mind being named here – it was the China Glen in Livingston. Guess I’m not going to be eating THERE then…

Shortly after that I was called by a rep from a catalogue company. "Is that Mrs McNugget?" she asked. (They always call me that. Most of the time I just say, "Sorry, you have the wrong number, no one by that name here!", but this time I decided to play along.) I admitted that it was,indeed, "Mrs McNugget". Even although that makes me sound like some kind of crazy cartoon Scottish person with a kilt and possibly a beard. "OK, Mrs McNuggest," said the telemarketer. "For security purposes, before we continue the call, I’m going to need you to confirm your address, postcode and telephone number."

Er, sorry, but WHY? Why have they started doing this? They call you to try and sell you something you don’t need/want, but before they do, they try to get you to hand over all of your personal details. WHY? Because they think you’re stupid, that’s why. I mean, if a random stranger walked up to you in the street and asked you for your name, address and telephone number, you wouldn’t just spit it out, would you?

Now, I did think this one had the potential to turn into the type of call I had with Lynette from MBNA that time, but I was feeling slightly frazzled by this point, so I settled for telling her that for MY security reasons I didn’t really want to give her my details, and she went away. And why was I feeling frazzled, I hear you ask? (Note: I don’t really. Oh, I KNOW you don’t care about my ongoing bathroom issues – I just pretend you do. It makes me feel important.) Because these calls (plus about five other marketing calls) came to me on Friday, which just so happened to mark the start of the Weekend of No Bathroom.

No, the bathroom project is STILL not finished. We DO now have most of the wall around the bath re-tiled, but the rest of the room still looks like a building site, and we weren’t able to use the shower for 48 hours while the "grout" dried, which meant that we’ve spent the weekend driving to the gym every time we wanted a shower. (I KNEW that gym membership would be useful for SOMETHING!) It wasn’t a whole lot of fun – especially not for Terry, who had to do the tiling AND listen to me whining about it all.

We’re hopeful it will be finished sometime before the end of the decade. In the meantime, this is Mrs McNugget, signing out…

There was a Whistler in the library this morning. Yes, a Whistler. In. the. Library. Where people are trying to read.

At first I thought I was hearing things, for surely everyone knows that the library is a place where there is QUIET. PLEASE. But "Peep!" came from over by the County and Westerns. And a few seconds later, "Peep peep!" came from the Large Print section. Yup, it was a Whistler alright. Is nowhere sacred?

Apparently not. Because here’s the thing: try as I might, I couldn’t really blame The Whistler for thinking that it was absolutely fine to be polluting the stillness of the library with his attention-seeking PEEPS. No, he was just taking his cue from everyone else in the library, most notably the librarians themselves, who were listening to the radio from their station. Their station IN THE LIBRARY, that is. The library where it used to be quiet, but where everyone’s now just blaring out music and freaking PEEPING all day long.

Encouraged by the inane chatter of breakfast time DJs and "chart-toppers" from the 80s, the other patrons were doing their utmost to add to the general din. Over by the computing section came the tinny roar of an MP3 player being basted at "loud enough so everyone in the library can hear it, even above the sound of the radio and The Whistler" level. (Aside: why do people who do this always listen to crappy dance music?) In the "research" area, two women were sitting chatting away IN LOUD VOICES. Well, they kinda had to be loud to be heard above the rest of the racket, didn’t they? Their children, meanwhile, played a loud game of chase around one of the book carousels, shrieking at the top of their little lungs as they did so.

PEEP! said the Whistler!
SHRIEK! said the children!
TINNY ROAR OF TRANCE MUSIC! said the MP3 player.
"We don’t give a crap because we’re too busy listening to the radio" said the librarians!

"IS NOWHERE SACRED?" said the crazy redhead who, seriously, just went in there to escape the sounds of plumbing this morning, and, OK, because she had that fine to pay. I mean, seriously, I’m well aware of the fact that most people like to behave as if they are the ONLY people in the entire world, and that the world revolves entirely around them, but is it too much to ask that they could just shut the hell up for a few minutes while they’re in the damn library?

Is it?

I swear to God the humble telephone will be the death of me, one of these fine days, it really will.

For the past few months, Terry and I have been getting the odd "funny" phone call, only they’ve been not so much "funny" as they’ve been just plain "odd". And also: annoying. Really freaking annoying.

You see, these phone calls come in the middle of the night, or in the early hours of the morning, whichever way you want to look at it. The caller’s preferred time is 2:20am, but this week he/she/it has broken out a bit, so on Monday morning we were called at 6:30am, and this morning we got The Call at 4:30am.

Now, as you all probably know, phone calls in the middle of the night = someone is dead, so, needless to say, these calls haven’t gone down well around these here parts, especially given that when we answer them THERE IS NO ONE THERE. (Actually, we’re just assuming there’s no one there. There was no one there the couple of times Terry managed to get to the phone before it rung off. Now he mostly just fumbles around on the bedside table while I shout "OH MY GOD, SOMEONE IS DEAD!" at him. Then the phone stops ringing and we are none the wiser as to whether there was anyone there or not. But there wasn’t, trust me).

So, in most cases, phone calls with no one on the end of them would mean one of three things:

• Total Assholes Management are on the case again, GOD.
• Some other intellectually-challenged individual is… I believe the expression is "playing silly buggers" with us.
• Um, ghosts are phoning us? From the Netherworld? Maybe?

We know for certain that it isn’t numbers one or two (Number three we’re not so sure about, but given that I only just thought of that, and will probably be able to totally freak myself out if I think about it any more, let’s just discount that one for the time being, too.) and the reason we know this is that whoever is calling us isn’t bothering to block their number before hitting "dial". So, basically, every time they call us, all we have to do is dial 1471 (which is the equivalent of *69 if you’re in the States and wondering what the hell I’m talking about now), and we get their number, which is (just in case you actually care, or are also being stalked by this Phantom Phoner) is 01142838829.

It’s a Sheffield number, but that’s really all we know about it at the moment because there’s no record of it on the Internet, and Reverse Lookup is illegal in the UK, so there’s no way of getting an address from a telephone number. We’ve tried calling it back, obviously – lots and lots of times, at all hours of the day and night – and it either rings out or is constantly engaged. Once, when the Phantom Phoner woke us at 2:30am and I couldn’t get back to sleep, I took the phone into bed with me and just kept hitting "redial", but it was engaged all night. Oh, lots of fun we’ve had with this one, let me tell you!

So far, in our quest to put a stop to the Phantom Phoner we have:

• Called our telephone provider, who said there was absolutely nothing they could do to help
• Reported the number to Ofcom, who said it was all very interesting, thanks, but that they can’t help with individual cases and can only monitor levels of complaints.
• Reported the number to the Telephone Preference Service, which we’re members of. I’m not quite sure why we’re members of the TPS, though, because it doesn’t stop Total Assholes Management, and it seems there’s nothing they can do about the Phantom Phoner, either.
• Contacted the police. They said there was nothing they could do as there is "no evidence of criminal intent". The fact that it’s a criminal act – i.e. harassment – seemed to go right over their heads. They told us to contact our telephone provider. Who, the second time we called them… told us to contact the police. D’oh.
• Complained to the Information Commissioner. At last, we start to get somewhere! The ICO say that, yes, they are the correct people to contact with problems of this nature! But that we will have to print out a bunch of forms, fill them in, post them back and wait up to a month for a response. And in the meantime? Keep on being woken up at 2am, I guess.

To be honest, we’re pretty sure it’s an automatic dialler – some kind of telemarketing company with a dialler that’s malfunctioning and calling us in the middle of the night every so often. If there was any malicious intent – even just to annoy us – I can’t imagine that the person would be so stupid as to not block their phone number before calling (although, come to think of it, I do see stupid people…), and the fact that the number in question is always either constantly engaged or ringing out makes us think it’s an office of some kind.

What do we do about it, though? Well, er, nothing for the moment, apparently. But one more call from The Phantom of the Phone Dialler and it looks like the police will be hearing from us again…

Once again I find myself wondering just why the hell it is that phones don’t come complete with an "exterminate" button. It would make my life so much easier, and also: more fun!

A "company" (I use that word in its loosest term, because they don’t have a website and if I look them up on Companies House, I just bet they won’t be there) calling themselves Total Asset Management (Henceforth: Total Assholes Management) are harassing me. And Terry, in fact. Every day they call me, asking if I’d like to receive their information pack on Asshole Management, which is a field in which they claim some considerable expertise. I am not even a little bit surprised.

Every day I tell them that no, I do not want to receive their information pack, and that, actually, we’re with the Telephone Preference Service, which means that they’re not allowed to be calling us. Every day, they apologize, promise never to call again, hang up and… less than one minute later, they call back and ask to speak to Terry.

AAARRRRRGH!

Every day, as soon as this little pantomime is over, Terry and I shake our heads like the wise old owls we’re not,  tell ourselves that really, we should report these people to the Telephone Preference Service, or… someone… and then do absolutely nothing about it, partly because we are lazy, but partly because the calls are obviously coming from abroad (the callers are always speaking heavily-accented pidgin English, and have difficulty pronouncing their own, very English-sounding, names and the number always comes up as "unavailable") so there’s probably not much the TPS could do about it, anyway.

Today, though, they have gone too far, for today Total Assholes Management have called me no less than SEVEN TIMES. Seven. Times. The first call came this morning, and was from a woman with an Indian accent who introduced herself as "Clara MacDonald" (a common name in that part of the world, I believe. Weird how she couldn’t quite pronounce it, though!). Before she had even got started on her spiel, I interrupted and explained to her that her company has been calling me every day, and that I’d like it to stop now, please, so could she remove me from her dialer. She apologised, said she’d never call again, and then, the requisite sixty seconds, she was back on the phone.

"Hello!" she said brightly, if indistinctly. "It is … Clara… Macd…Mac…Donald…from Total Assholes Management! I would like to speak to Mr Terry Mia… oh! Oooooh! Ooooh noooo!"

Then she hung up.

Now, if there’s one thing I hate more than people interrupting my (important!) work to try and sell me something, it’s someone who interrupts my work just so they can hang up on me. My blood boiled, but I had to content myself with ranting about it to Terry, who had been in the shower at the time, and had missed the (complete lack of) fun. Luckily for me, though (because I like a bit of drama), they called back this afternoon.

This time my caller was "Mike Smith", also of Total Assholes Management. I explained to Mike that his company had already called twice today, and asked to speak to his manager. So he hung up on me. Then he called back and asked to speak to Terry, who was at the gym. (Notice how I am NOT at the gym). Then he hung up on me when he realised that – whoops! – it was me again!

Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. This time it was "Nick Seargeant" of… can you guess? Yes! He was calling from Total Assholes Management! And he hung up on me before I could say anything more than "Can I take your phone numb…." Then he called back for Terry. And hung up! Again!

As I sit here writing this, the phone has just rung again. This time, there was no one there, but the number was "unavailable" and I’m willing to bet all I have (no one take me up on this) that it was my old pals from Total Assholes Management. I’d quite like to kill them now, to be honest. Ideally, by calling them on the phone repeatedly, until they go out of their tiny minds.

I’m thinking I need to be a bit cleverer about this now, though. By the time "Nick" called, I had already deciced that I was going to string the next Asshole Manager along a bit, keep them talking, make them think I’m interested in their scam, and somehow manage to get some details out of them that would allow me to report them to …. someone. Because I am a totally awesome detective-type person like that. But, of course, now they just keep hanging up before I can get a word out. Maybe it would be more fun to buy a whistle (OH GOD, NO!) and blow it down the phone next time they call. That wouldn’t work out so good if it turned out to be a client calling, though, hmmmm?

So, I hand my dilemma over to you, good readers. How should Total Asshole Management be handled?Over to you…

Oh, and just to add: no, not answering the phone isn’t an option – they’re calling on the business line, not the home line, which can legitimately be ignored.

So, you’d think having the content of my entire blog stolen would probably be the most unfair thing that would happen to us all weekend, right?

You would be wrong. It wasn’t the most unfair thing that happened all weekend. The most unfair thing that happened was when Terry was stopped by the police, just for having a nice car. Because that totally makes sense.

We were on the way to Edinburgh for a barbecue when we saw the police car. It was heading in the opposite direction, but as soon as the cops noticed us they did a big, dramatic U-turn and started following us. Exciting! I love a chase, me. Not that it was much of a "chase" though: Terry, who was driving, had noticed them turn round, and had been watching them in his rear view mirror, so he knew they were following him. Actually, Terry pretty much always knows when the police are following him, because the police pretty much always are. It’s the car, we think. The car is old, but it is a bit flashy looking. Terry and I, on the other hand, are not even remotely flashy looking, so the police normally assume we stole the car. Many are the times Terry has been pulled over for no particular reason (OK, four are the times he’s been pulled over, and one of those times he was speeding), just so they can give it the once over and phone Interpol, or whatever it is that the police do in these situations.

But I digress. They pulled us over about sixty seconds after they started following us. Despite this, as soon as the cop came to the car window he decided to be all dramatic, and said, "You obviously don’t use your mirrors enough – we’ve been trying to pull you over for ages." This, my friends? Was a dirty, rotten lie. I hate that.

The reason they had pulled us over? They said the rear lights on the car were "illegal" and, indeed, "dangerous". This was news to us, because the car had been MOT’d just four days earlier. Yes, last week Terry went through the torture and fear that is an MOT-Day. When he drove away, £200 the lighter, he had no idea that he was driving away in a "dangerous" and "illegal" vehicle. "Why would the car have passed the MOT if it was dangerous and illegal?" said Terry to the cop. "Pshaw!" said the cop to Terry. "An MOT does not check whether your vehicle is legal or not! Tut!" Then he took Terry away to his car and kept him there for twenty minutes. I remained in the car with a pile of marinated pork and seven barbecue spears on my knee, thanking Christ that they hadn’t stopped me and checked my tax disc twice, because, whoops, although I bought a new one, I didn’t actually remember to put it on the car.

Now, this situation sucked, and the police knew it did. They tried really hard to find something else wrong with the car, going over it with a finetooth comb (Note: not really. They just used their hands.) and seemed to be really gutted when everything was in order. After all that, they didn’t even fine Terry: instead, having told him that he should not trust the MOT test centre to tell him whether his car is legal or not, he has to take it to the MOT test centre within the next 21 days, and get them to tell him whether it’s legal or not. So, just to clarify: he must take his car to Kwick Fit and get them to sign a piece of paper saying that they reckon the car is safe to drive. This would be the same Kwick Fit he took the car to last week, and who gave him a piece of paper saying that they reckoned it was safe to drive. Words fail me. (Note: not really, again. Or I wouldn’t have written this mammoth blog post, would I?)

So, this has annoyed me quite a bit. My feeling – and I am rarely wrong about these things – is that the cops were just bored and decided to pick on Terry because they saw him driving a nice car. Also, even although it is something I’ve always suspected, I am also surprised to find that the MOT test is not, in fact, a test to see if there is anything wrong with your car, but is a test to see if there’s any way the garage can arrange to take money from you. I feel a bit ripped off, really.

Still, at least the barbecue was good.

So, in preparation for the start of Project Calm the Hell Down, I headed to the library on Friday to get myself a big pile o’books. While I was standing in the queue to check out this big pile o’books, I noticed two little boys standing in front of me. Suddenly, as if moved by some kind of sixth sense, Little Boy # 1 turned his head towards me, Exorcist style. He glanced at me and then did one of those comedy double-takes, his eyes widening in horror.

"Kids!" I thought, glancing quickly down to make sure I hadn’t, you know, forgotten to wear pants or something. But I hadn’t forgotten. And my humiliation was not yet over.

Little Boy # 1 turned to Little Boy # 2 and began whispering frantically in his ear, casting excited glances in my direction all the while. Something in his demeanor told me he was telling LB#2, "Don’t look now and make it too obvious, but…" Sure enough, both boys turned to face the front, and, after a discreet pause, Little Boy # 2 swivelled his head towards me, took a good look, and then collapsed, giggling, upon his friend.

WHY? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? Why am I suddenly an object of ridicule to little kids?

Because I’m not much of a one for suffering the little children and all that jazz, I opened my mouth to tell them that, yes, I could see them laughing at me and it wasn’t very nice now, was it… then I remembered Project Calm the Hell Down, so I took a deep breath instead and satisfied myself with imagining how one day they, too, will be old and laughed at by young whippersnappers.

BUT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? Is it because I’m a "ginger"?  (I don’t think it can be, because LB#2 had red hair too). Was it the over sized sunglasses perched on top of my head which, OK, make me look a bit like a giant human insect, but hey, I like looking like a giant human insect, and anyway, they help with the migraines? Am I too fat for my skinny jeans? WHAT?

In better news, Project Calm the Hell Down is going well. Today? I didn’t get up until 9.30am. Go me!

So, how’s this for crappy customer service?

For the last week, the Next Directory have called us EVERY SINGLE DAY without fail. Every. Single. Day.

"Hello!" they’ll say. "Can we speak to Mrs McLoughlin, please!"

and "Get lost!" we’ll reply. "No one of that name here, now don’t phone us again!"

The message, though, it just hasn’t been getting through. Yesterday, when they called, and Terry asked them (politely) to please stop with the phone harassment? They hung up on him. Today? Why, today they took things to a whole new level of utter stupidity.

Today, you see, rather than being called by a real, live person, the Next Directory chose to have a machine call us. Yes, a machine! "Please. Call. The. Next. Directory," the machine said, robotically, before reading out a phone number veeeeeerrrryyyy slllloooowwwwlllly.

I called the number. I got another machine. "The. Next. Directory. Called. You. Today." said the new machine. "There. Is. No. Need. To. Call. Us."

Aaaargh! At this point my head actually exploded, so it was some time before I managed to find their customer service number (actually, this was mostly because this is a secret number, that Next do their damndest to keep hidden) and get a real person on the end of the phone. "How can I help you?" she asked. "Well, you can stop calling me every day in life, hanging up on me and then getting your evil machines to call me instead FOR NO REASON," I replied. She put me on hold. For over five minutes.

When the woman finally came back to me (and bear in mind I have nothing better to do with my time than sit and listen to hold music. Nothing at all.) she was all a-fluster, but she did promise they would stop calling me. I bet they won’t, though. I just bet they won’t. The moral of the story: it’s crap when machines start calling you, isn’t it? The purpose of this entry? To allow me to procrastinate and try to avoid the huge amount of work that’s threatening to kill me. Happy Friday, people!