So, I decided to start running outdoors again. Yeah, I know: been there, done that, got the washed-out Nike t-shirt (actually it’s a tank top, but whatever) to prove it.
If you’ve been reading this blog since God was a teenager, however, you’ll know that I don’t tend to have much luck with running outdoors. Or even just being outdoors. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say my last experiment in this area was a complete and utter failure. You see, I was afeared. I was scared in that way that I think most women are when they find themselves out in the middle of nowhere, on their own and with no-one to hear them scream should something bad happen. “What if someone tries to kill me?” I would think, as I plodded up some lonely woodland trail or other. “I bet they wouldn’t find my body for YEARS out here!” And so the fear drove me away from those pretty woodland trails and towards the streets near my house, around which I would circle endlessly, passing the same, suburban scenes over and over and over again, seeing the same people multiple times, and getting the same looks of shocked disbelief from them every single time. (If someone’s running in this town, it normally means the police are after them…)
This got very boring, very quickly. Eventually, it got SO boring that I headed back to the gym, and the treadmill. At least people don’t stop what they’re doing to stare at you on the treadmill, you know? Well, not ALL the time, anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the treadmill. It’s my “thinking” time. And sometimes it’s my “not thinking” time, where I just put on some good music and let my mind go blank. Or blanker than usual. Other times, though, it’s my “Damn, but this is BORING!” time, and when that started to be the case more often than not, my mind once again turned towards the idea of running outdoors.
This time would be different, I thought. This time I would not be afraid. I would run where I wanted to run, and I would ignore the incredulous stares. It would be ace!
So, one fine day in July (it was literally the ONE fine day in July, seriously), I pulled on my running shoes and headed out into the great outdoors. What could go wrong, I thought? I had a phone with GPS on it. If I got lost, all I had to do was pull up a map, and I’d be found. (Also, it’s a PHONE. That you can use to speak to people on). And if someone tried to kill me, why, I was a RUNNER! I would RUN AWAY. Fast. Or I would poke them in the eye with my keys. It would be fine!
And actually, it was fine. Our town didn’t really exist before the 1960s. It was one of the “new towns” that were built in Scotland around then, and it has a very 1960s look to it: lots of concrete, buildings like boxes, strange bits of “street art” that have long-since become so thickly coated with graffiti that they’ve actually started to look better than they originally did, in that grim, urban kind of way. There is, however, also a river, and the area around the river is rather lovely. Lots of woodland trails that make you feel like you’re out in the country, even although you’re smack-dab in the centre of town, water rushing, birds chirping, flowers, er, flowering… I even saw a group of bunnies, people, and what could be better than that? (Oh, and every now and then, dotted in amongst the foliage, will be some graffiti-coated concrete edifice from the 60s. It’s awesome, seriously.)
Well, I finished my run, and I LOVED it. I actually don’t know this town very well, or not on foot, anyway. In the car, I could take you anywhere, but I’ve never really walked around it, which is a shame, because there are so many little interesting footpaths and trails that it was like a little adventure. I was converted. I was going to be running outside ALL THE TIME from now on, I decided. It would be my “thing”. I would be Fearless Adventurer Amber! I couldn’t wait!
A couple of days later, then, I set out again, with the adventuring. Once again, I headed to the river, and I was having a fine old time. So I ran on. And on. And on. It was great. The trees! The river! More bunnies! And then, in the middle of nowhere, under a random bridge… a tramp! Um, OK. I stopped at this point. The Fear returned. It seemed obvious to me that this man would try and kill me. I mean, why else would you be hanging out under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, if not to kill the next random runner girl that went past? Well, no problem, I thought, I would just double back a bit, and pick up the trail further along the river.
You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? And I’m glad YOU can, because I certainly couldn’t see where I going. Leaving my country trail, you see, I found myself in a network of streets. This town is full of such networks. You get into them, and you can wander around for weeks, until someone stumbles across your poor, emaciated form and takes you in. Ironically enough, I knew exactly where I was. It was a part of town I’ve been to many times in the car, and a couple of times on foot, although on those occasions I was with Terry, who is a native of the town and knows its many secrets.
So I knew where I was: I just didn’t know how to get from there to where I wanted to be. Not on foot, anyway. If I’d had my car there, I could have driven straight home. That route, however, would take me along busy main roads, and wasn’t one I really wanted to take on foot, so I turned and plunged back into the woods, determined to work it out. Well, I ran and I ran. I ran for about a mile, and then the path I was on returned me abruptly to the same street I’d started from, having apparently taken me in a large loop. I turned around and set off again, this time taking a different route… which took me to slightly further along the same street I started from. Hmm.
Once again, I set off into the woods. There are lots of different routes through these woods, I discovered. You set off down one track, only to find it splitting into three more tracks a little way along it, with no clue where each of them leads. If only I’d been prepared, like the Famous Five, and brought a ball of string to unwind as I went, I might have had even the slightest clue where I was going, but alas, no. I knew I’d gone wrong again, when I encountered these:
What was disturbing about this was that I took this photo with my phone camera, which means I was just as close to those sheep as it looks. I was in a field with sheep! Sheep were in a field with me! This was ALL KINDS OF WRONG, and by now I was starting to get a little annoyed, mostly because it was getting close to lunchtime, and if I didn’t get home soon, I’d miss Neighbours. That right there tells you all you need to know, really, doesn’t it?
Well, I turned round and I retraced my weary steps. Arriving back, once again, at the street I’d started from, I encountered a woman in a car, who slowed down and asked me directions to the mall. “If I knew where I was, I might be able to tell you,” I said, which was actually a total LIE, because I am absolutely useless when it comes to giving people directions. I couldn’t direct you from my front door to the bottom of the driveway. I can’t read maps, either, which was why I now realised that when I’d come up with the whole “I can’t possibly get lost because I have Google maps on my phone” thing, I’d obviously been smoking crack:
The map, then, was no good to me, and time was a-wastin’, so I decided to admit defeat, call Terry and ask him to come and get me. This would be humiliating, sure: I mean, I was “lost” in a place I knew well, and which I could have driven home from in a matter of minutes, but I figured walking back along that route would be a) dangerous and b) time-consuming, so I sucked it up, got my phone back out…
… and it had no credit on it. OF COURSE NOT.
This has long been a bone of contention between Terry and I. When I got my iPhone, you see, Terry insisted we go for a Pay-as-You-Go tariff, his reasoning being that as I never, ever phone anyone anyway, it would be a waste of money to pay a monthly fee for it. “You could put £10 worth of credit on the phone and it would last you all year,” said Terry, little knowing that I would burn through three times that amount in the space of ten minutes at Gran Canaria airport just a few short months later.
We argued about this for a while. My fear was that, with Pay-as-You-Go, I would always run out of credit at the exact moment I most needed it. It was inevitable, I said. AND WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT, TERRY, HUH? HUH?
So I had no credit. I couldn’t phone Terry, or, indeed anyone else. And I had no money. Of COURSE NOT. Because when you go running in the middle of nowhere, you don’t take anything with you that could conceivably be of any use, do you?
So I sent Terry an email. The phone allowed me to do this, luckily. (Actually, the more I think about it, the more grateful I am that emergency calls are free on these things. Because if they weren’t, and I got into an ACTUAL emergency, I’d have to send the police an email saying, “Help! Am being attacked!” And, knowing me, because I really detest text speak, and can never bring myself to use it, I would type it all out totally correctly, and then spell-check it before hitting send.) Unluckily, however, Terry is not like me, and doesn’t spend all day hovering over his email like a giant bat. So it took him ten minutes to read my message, during which I had decided to embark upon the long road home, using the only route I knew would definitely take me there, and not send me back to the sheep.
Now, imagine you get an email from your wife saying that she is lost, and needs your help. What do you do? Do you call her, say? OF COURSE NOT. You simply send her an email in response, and you do this because YOU DO NOT KNOW HER PHONE NUMBER.
No, Terry and I do not know each other’s phone numbers. In fairness, we don’t really need to, because we have them programmed into our phones. This is of no use to Terry whatsoever, though, because when he got my email, his phone battery was dead. OF COURSE IT was. Terry’s phone is almost always dead, and when it’s not dead? It’s lost. He’s not big on the whole cellphone thing, either, you see.
Just to recap, then: my phone has no credit, his has no battery life. He doesn’t have my phone number, I don’t have a brain. WE FAIL. At everything. GOD.
To bring this lengthy story to an end, though, I emailed Terry my number, he called me, and a few minutes later, came to my rescue. And all the way home, he pointed out the routes I COULD have taken. Which is really the story of my life.
(I now take spare change with me when I go running. Terry keeps his phone charged, and I always have credit on my phone. Not all of these statements are true…)
Tagged phones, running, sheep
Phones. I hate ‘em. I know I don’t have to explain this to any regular readers, but for those just joining us, I am phone phobic in the extreme, and will go to any lengths to avoid making or receiving phone calls - I have even been reduced to begging Terry to do it for me if it’s absolutely essential.
I particularly hate mobile phones. The very nature of mobile phones means that people are always going to call you on them at an inconvenient time. I mean, if I’m not at home, it’s because I’m out doing something. If I’m out doing something, then it’s not going to be a great time to chat, is it? Add to that the fact that it always seems to be a crappy connection, and there’s always loads of background noise outdoors, and, yeah, I pretty much hate being called on my mobile, and will avoid calling people on theirs, either, employing the same logic of “if they’re not at home, they’re probably too busy to chat”. Sure, I’m surgically attached to my iPhone at all times, but that’s because of the Internet access and the apps. The actual phone part is for emergencies only as far as I’m concerned, which is why any time the phone rings, I immediately assume that it’s an emergency, and fly into a total panic.
Like I did today, for instance.
I’d just arrived at the dentist’s office to be fitted with my next set of Invisalign braces. I was a few minutes early, so I pulled out my phone to pass the time on Twitter and… whoops! Two missed calls, both from the same number, missed on account of the fact that I’d somehow managed to switch the phone to “silent”. The number wasn’t one I recognised. It wasn’t from any of my contacts, but whoever it was had wanted to speak to me urgently enough that they’d called twice, so I pulled up Google and typed in the area code so see where they were calling from, and work out from that whether I wanted to call them back or not.
The area code was from the town my dad used to work in up until the start of the year. He’s since moved offices, but still works for the same firm, so there was a chance they’d sent him to the other office for the day. And that he’d, I don’t know, DIED or something while he was there.
* PANIC *
(A little bit about my dad, here: my dad is the person I inherited my propensity to walk into doors and bang my head on low-hanging objects from. Not a week goes by – and I’m honestly not joking here – without him bashing his head on something hard enough to leave a mark. He works for a company who have a lot of heavy, dangerous machinery lying around. You can see where I’m coming from here…)
Well, I called my dad, got voicemail. Tried to email him, phone refused to send the email. And, at that point, I was called in to my appointment, so I got to spend the next 20 minutes lying with my mouth wedged open, PANICKING. It was the exact opposite of fun.
As soon as I was released, I called my dad again: nothing. So I called my mum, who assured me that if something had happened, she’d have been called first, and she hadn’t, so this meant all was well. I calmed down a little, but was still sufficiently disturbed that when I got home I typed the full phone number into Google. I didn’t expect to find anything, but to my surprise, Google found an exact match for that number, and not only was it from the town my dad used to work in, and possibly could be in at that very minute….
… it was from the MEDICAL CENTRE IN THAT TOWN.
I mean, what are the odds of that?
So, two missed calls from a medical centre in a town there was a good chance my dad was in: PANIC.
Well, I called the number, and asked why they’d been calling me. And they had absolutely no idea. “Are you a patient here?” they asked. “No? Oh, well, there’s no possible way for us to check why we were calling you, then. Maybe a wrong number? Maybe someone you know is DEAD?”
“If it was something really urgent,” I said, “you’d have left a message, right?”
“Oh no,” said the receptionist cheerfully. “We never leave messages! Have a nice day, now!”
Now, I immediately got back on the phone to my mum (I still don’t have my dad’s new office number, or I’d obviously have called him directly) who, as luck would have it, had just spoken to my dad a few minutes earlier, and was able to reassure me that not only was he alive and well, he was nowhere near the town these people had been calling me from. So all’s well that ends well, except I’ve lost a few years of my life to the panic, and have probably earned a few grey hairs into the bargain.
I just want to say, though, people: LEAVE MESSAGES. Seriously, if you’re calling someone, and you’re a medical centre, say, LEAVE A MESSAGE TO SAY WHY YOU’RE CALLING. Don’t just leave them to Google your number, assume some has died, and then not be able to find out who. LEAVE A MESSAGE. It’s what voicemail is for, and it would possibly have helped keep me just a little bit saner this morning. Possibly not, though. I mean, I am the Queen of Worry. I worry all the time, about everything. I can’t even hear an ambulance go past without assuming it’s rushing to the scene of an accident involving everyone I know. This morning’s events , though, took me right back to those dark days when Terry was ill and almost every single day brought a fresh reason to panic like there was no tomorrow. I’m every glad those days are over. I do, however, think there are important lessons to be learnt, here:
1. LEAVE A MESSAGE
2. Keep your phone switched on (DAD) so you can be reached in case of emergency
3. If you are a medical centre, never call me again. And for the love of Gaga, check you’ve got the right number before you decide to give someone else a heart attack…
Tagged phones, The Panic
Following on from my post about telephone etiquette, I thought of some more random things that annoy me about the way people use the phone. So here they are:
1. People who send text messages during gym classes, or answer their phones. Come on, it’s ONE HOUR, surely you can survive that long without using the phone? I mean, I manage to last that long without checking my email, and I check my email constantly, so I know you can do it too. Fair enough if you have an emergency, but some people at our gym answer their phones during every single class, and they’ve never once had to leave the class as a result of what was said to them on the phone/by text message, so I’m going to assume it wasn’t THAT much of an emergency.
2. People who answer the phone while you’re visiting them, and then have a long conversation with the person on the other end, while you sit there looking on like a dumbass. Extra points if the person frequently roars with laughter while pointing to their handset and making faces to indicate that “OMG, this is the Best! Phonecall! Ever!” If I wanted to sit silently staring at the wall for half an hour, I’d do it at home, thanks. Is it really so hard to say, “Look, I have company right now, I’ll call you later”? Apparently.
3. Retail workers who answer the phone when there’s a long line of people standing waiting to pay. The people who are actually IN your store waiting to buy something should come before the one who calls to ask you eighteen questions about your stock. If you must answer the phone to them (and I understand it’s annoying to let the phone ring), THEY’RE the ones who should be put on hold.
4. People who phone you to tell you they’ve just sent you an email.
5. People who phone you five minutes after sending you an email to ask why you haven’t answered it yet.
6. A possibly controversial one, but: people with a non-urgent enquiry who call your home phone and, getting no answer, immediately call your mobile. If I’m not at home, I’m out. If I’m out, I’m probably busy doing something. If I’m busy doing something, I probably don’t want to be disturbed while I’m doing it. (And yes, I know the whole point of MOBILE phones is so that people can reach you when you’re, er, mobile, but I still view this as an “only if you really HAVE to speak to me rightthatveryminute” thing. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but this need for near-constant communication just irks me.)
7. People who use their phones in movie theatres. Seriously, that should be an arrestable offence.
8. People who phone you about a work-related matter you’ve specifically asked them to email you about. And then say, “I know you asked me to email you, but I thought it would be easier if I just called instead.” Well, it may be easier for YOU, but it’s not easier for me. That’s why I asked you to email me. If it was easier to do whatever -it-is by phone, I’d have asked you to phone me. (This doesn’t happen so much now, but when I used to freelance, I much preferred people to put the instructions for their project in writing, so I could be totally clear about what they wanted, and so they couldn’t come back to me two weeks later and say, “oh, but I really wanted you to do it THIS way…” It was fine for them to have an initial phonecall to discuss the thing, obviously, but when it came to them giving me long lists of complicated instructions, I needed them in writing, because no, it just wasn’t easier for me to struggle to write them all down/remember them with the phone lodged beneath my chin and the person talking nineteen-to-the-dozen on the other end.)
9. People who phone you really late at night. Look, it’s nice that you were thinking of me, but if it’s later than about 10pm, I’m going to assume someone just died.
10. People who call you really early in the morning. And then say, “Oh, sorry, were you sleeping?” Well, it’s 8am on a Sunday morning and I’ve been working all week, so… yeah. Extra points if they then smugly say, “Oh, I’ve been up for HOURS, I just can’t lie in bed all day!”
11. People who call you and then eat something noisily with their mouth right next to the receiver. If there was a “detonate” button on the phone, I’d use it on these people.
Any more?
Tagged phones
One morning last week, Terry and I returned home from the gym to discover the light on the answerphone flashing. Amongst the usual work-related messages that had been left (for Terry, obviously, not for me. Because I don’t actually “do” phone calls.) was a message from a Mystery Woman. “Please call me back,” said the Mystery Woman, in heavily accented English, before giving her number and then hanging up. It was actually quite thrilling, to be honest, like the start of an adventure novel which sees our intrepid, titian haired heroine travel the world, battling against the clock to solve the Mystery of the Mysterious Caller. Oh no, wait… I’m confusing myself with Nancy Drew again. Sorry. Where was I?
So, the Mystery Woman left her number. And that was it. No salutation, no indication of who she was, or what she was calling about – nothing to even tell us which one of us she was trying to reach. I mean, it could have been Rubin for all we knew. He gets a lot of calls like that: some of his friends have no manners AT ALL, really.
Well, Terry and I thought about this for about two seconds (and I Twittered about it, obviously), and decided that, nah, if it was THAT important to her, she’d surely call back. And she did. And do you know who our Mystery Caller was?
She was a telemarketer.
Yes, she wanted US to call HER, so she could try and talk us into buying something we didn’t want or need. Seriously, how cheeky is that? Very cheeky, I’d say. It’s bad enough that they call us all day long (Yes, we signed up to the Telephone Preference Service, but it doesn’t apply to business numbers, which ours is, and it also doesn’t stop people calling you from foreign call centres.) but expecting us to call them back? Seriously?
I thought this was a one off. But then yesterday night, an email flooded in. The subject line said “Can you call XXXXX?” (Company name removed to protect the very guilty) The body of the email contained… well, nothing, actually, other than the email signature of the person who sent it, which included the person’s phone number.
Well, of course I COULD phone that company. But the thing is, I didn’t want to. Not with my new knowledge of the way certain telemarketers have apparently started to operate, anyway, and actually, not before then either, to be honest, because I think it’s just horribly rude for a complete stranger to demand that you call them without saying why. No?
Instead, I emailed the person back to ask why they wanted to speak to me. This one turned out NOT to be a telemarketer. He was, however, a journalist who wanted my help (in the form of some quotes) for an article he was writing, and he went about asking for this help in just about the rudest way possible – and I say this as a former journalist myself. My rule of thumb when dealing with people like this is that if they can’t be bothered to be even reasonably polite when they’re asking for my help I can’t be bothered to help them. So I stopped replying to his emails, and when I got home from the gym this morning, I discovered that he had tried to call me no less than nine times. NINE. TIMES. Because, as we all know, if someone is out when you call them, phoning back repeatedly, at three minute intervals, is the best way to make them magically re-appear. Only not really, obviously.
The lesson in all of this? It pays to be polite. Also, if we didn’t have to have a phone for business reasons, I’d throw ours out of the window. Twice.
Tagged email fun, phones
One of the biggest advantages of being self-employed and working from home is that I don’t really have to leave the house very often if I don’t want to. In the winter, I don’t normally want to, so while we obviously HAVE to leave the house sometimes, I will actively avoid anything that puts me in contact with the icy chill of the outside world for longer than it takes to walk from the house to the car. The car that has generally been pre-heated and de-iced by Terry before I have to go anywhere near it. Sometimes it pays to be a total princess about stuff, you know?
This morning, though, I wanted to go to an early morning (!) gym class, and Terry didn’t, and so it was that I found myself face to face with a car that resembled a block of solid ice. Of course, given that I don’t generally go outside at this time of year any more, I had totally neglected to allow time before my class for the scraping of the car, and so once I’d managed to prise the door open with my fingers (it was frozen solid and I should just have taken that as A Sign and gone back to bed, in retrospect) I decided there was no option but to go for the old “lukewarm water on the windows” trick (Note: don’t try this at home, kids.) if I wanted to get to the gym on time.
What I didn’t realise, though, is that Terry had rearranged the contents of the kitchen since the last time I’d been in there, so I couldn’t find any kind of jug/other large water receptacle suitable for the pouring of lukewarm water on my car. I guess I could’ve used the kettle, now I come to think of it, but… well, I DIDN’T come to think of it. It was early. I don’t really “do” early.
So I used a teacup.
It was the only thing I could find in a hurry, and seriously, never use a teacup to carry lukewarm water to your car, because only stupid people do that. It does not save time, because you have to make eleventy one trips to and from the kitchen, clutching your cup of lukewarm water, and if you’re anything like me, your paranoia of cracking the windscreen will mean that your water isn’t quite lukewarm enough, and so, by the time you’ve finished pouring it onto the car, and have managed to locate a pair of old sunglasses in the Ikea Cabinet O’Doom that lives by your door (because despite being freezing cold, it was naturally so sunny I couldn’t see a damn thing without them), the water you’ve just poured over your car to defrost it will have re-frozen, and you’ll have to start all over again, only this time using the scraper, like you should have done in the first place.
Also, if you’re like me, the leg of the old sunglasses you dug up will fall off on your way down the driveway, but by now you’ll be running so late you won’t have time to return to the house for a new pair, so you’ll be forced to drive to the gym with the broken sunglasses perched on your nose, held there by a single leg and sheer willpower. GOD.
Having gone through all of this even before leaving the driveway, though, it stood to reason that my car would wait until we were halfway to the gym and then decide to pull one of its “I’m about to break down and ain’t nothing you can do about it!” tricks. I had been expecting this. As those of you with the patience of saints will recall, the car has done this before, last winter, and the considered opinion of Those Who Know About Cars on that occasion was, “The car doesn’t like the cold.” Yeah, no joke. I know how it feels.
So, we get to the first set of traffic lights between the house and the gym. Naturally, they are at red, so I stop the car and as soon as I do, it starts the whole, “I think I might… Yes, I will! I’m going to stall now! Yes, I am! I am! I totally am! Actually, no, I’m not. All fine. As you were.” To which I replied: “#%$!!*”&”
Despite this, we reached the gym without stalling. Only to find that the class I’d tried so hard to get to on time? Wasn’t on. Instead, they’d decided to have a step class. I do not do step classes. So I dragged my weary ass into the gym itself and onto a treadmill. The treadmill was next to a window. From the window, I could see my car sitting in the car park. It looked like it was planning something. Something probably involving stalling in the middle of a busy roundabout and condemning me to certain death. I was sure of it. And there was no way I was driving it home while it was in that kind of mood.
So I decided to make Terry drive it home.
I think it’s fair to say Terry wasn’t exactly thrilled to get that phone call. In fact, I may have become slightly hysterical as I tried to convince him that the car was totally trying to kill me, and that he should come and drive it home, leaving me his safe, non-murderous car instead. Terry did his best to convince me, in turn, that no, the car was fine, and that maybe I could just bring The Drama down a notch or two and DRIVE HOME LIKE A NORMAL PERSON but there’s no reasoning with me when I’m like… there’s no reasoning with me. Terry would have to bring himself, his car and his headache to the gym, and that’s why the next time he sees MY number come up on the caller display, he’ll know better than to answer.
Terry had told me to go and start up the car while I was waiting for him, so I went downstairs and as I opened the double doors of the gym’s snack bar, which you have to walk through to get out, I heard The Beatles strike up on the radio. Really loudly.
“PAAAAAAPPPPPERRRRBAAAACKKK WRRIIIIITTEEEER! ” said The Beatles. “Writer, writer!”
“That’s nice!” said I. “Love that song. Also: I would like to be a Paperback Writer too someday! Lovely. Very loud, though.”
I walked to the doors, humming along as I went, and actually feeling quite sad as the gym doors closed behind me and the music stopped. I headed to the car, got in, and turned the key in the ignition.
It would not start.
I tried again.
It STILL wouldn’t start.
I tried one more time. This time, the car started, and as it did, the car spoke.
“PAAAAAAAAAAPPPEEERRRRBAAAACK WRRIIIIIIITTTEEEER!” said the car. “Writer! Writer!”
“Freaky!” said I. “I hope Paul McCartney isn’t dead or something, because why else would Paperback Writer be on constant rotation on the radio?”
But the radio wasn’t switched on. And I’m ashamed to admit this, but when I realised that, it took me a good couple of minutes to stop freaking the hell out and wondering why The Beatles were haunting me, and just what it was John Lennon was trying to tell me from beyond the grave. Other than that he wanted to be a paperback writer, obviously. For surely, I told myself, the fact that my every move was now accompanied by the playing of Paperback Writer was some kind of Sign?
And it was. It was a sign, people.
It was a sign that SOMEONE WAS TRYING TO CALL ME, because Paperback Writer? Is the ring tone on my phone. The ring tone I set back when I first got the phone. In JUNE. This tells you how often people phone me. It also tells you that I’d obviously been walking through the gym with loud music blaring from my person. Yes, I was that asshole with the loud music! And now I feel bad about that girl whose eyes I wanted to poke out last week because she was playing music from her phone/MP3 player/thingy while wandering around a clothes shop. Maybe she just forgot what her ringtone sounded like too?
Anyway. Terry turned up not long after that, and pretended he didn’t actually mind being dragged out of the house to come to my “rescue”.
And then my car drove like a dream all the way home.
Figures.
Tagged car wars, phones, Terry
Hey, folks, guess who’s back? Back again! The Friday Five’s back! Tell your friends!
Yes, I created a monster ‘cos no one wants to see Amber no more, with her constant whining about the cold, the cold, and OMG, did I mention how much I hate THE COLD? So in a bid to breathe new life into the old blawg, and give a girl who spends all day, every day sitting in a darkened room looking at pictures of shoes on the Internet something to write about, I’m bringing back The Friday Five. And guess what? You can too! Questions come from here, so feel free to take part if you wish. I may do this every Friday, I may do it for a few weeks and then get bored, or I may just do it this once and never mention it again. You just never know with me, and that’s half the fun, only not really, obviously.
Anyway, on with the show. Here are today’s questions and my “have-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat” answers:
1. Could you live without your phone for 1 week for $500?
Seriously, I could live without my phone forever for $500. In fact, I’d do it for free if it meant never having to talk on the phone again. That’s how much I hate the phone. And although I love my actual phone in a “hey, this is a pretty cool toy” kinda way, I only ever use the alarm on it to wake me up in the mornings and remind me to do things, and the camera to take pictures of my dog. And, OK, of that one time I decided to try out Amy Winehouse-style eyeliner. If I could work out how to blog from it, which I think may be technically possible, I would use it more, but yeah, I’d still take the $500. When can I get it?
2. Whom do you talk to on the phone the most?
Um, probably my mum, who has the distinction (and, dare I say, pleasure) of being the person I call any time strange medical symptoms befall me. I’m trying to cut back on this, though, because I know you wouldn’t think it, but it’s actually not much fun for anyone. I also sometimes call Terry’s answerphone (because his phone is rarely switched on, and when it is he’s normally left it in the car, in someone else’s home, or, on a couple of occasions, in the washing machine) if he’s been away from home for longer than I was expecting and leave him a message saying, “OMG ARE YOU DEAD? ARE YOU? CALL ME IF YOU’RE NOT DEAD!”
3. Whom do you no longer talk to on the phone but wish you still did?
I’ve actually never really been a “phoner”. I was never one of those teenagers who hogged the telephone line all night chatting to her friends, and this was because I didn’t have no friends. No, I’m joking, I did have friends, but for some reason we didn’t really call each other all that much, other than to make specific arrangements about stuff. Maybe if cellphones had been invented back then, things would’ve been different, but of course we had to use smoke signals in those days, which was a total drag. So, in conclusion, I don’t think there’s anyone I used to phone but still wish I did. This is why we have email, surely?
4. If you could get ahold of one celebrity phone number, whose digits would you want?
Michael Stipe’s. I wouldn’t call him though, because I don’t think he would like that, and I wouldn’t know what to say to him, as I am Not Good On The Phone. Also, he totally didn’t accept my Facebook friends request, so no phone calls for him. (Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Michael Stipe’s heart breaking…)
5. Do you talk on the phone more or less than you used to?
I think the answer to this is probably self-evident, no? In the early days of The Business, when I used to do a lot of freelance writing, I had to talk on the phone a LOT, because people would call me up and ask things, and then call me again and ask more things, and it was all talky-talky-talk. It was my version of Hell on Earth, although obviously not quite as bad as the call centre I used to work in. (If there is a hell, I’m totally convinced it looks EXACTLY like a call centre, seriously…) Now I’m all about the blogging, people tend to email rather than phone, and while this makes Amber a Very Happy Girl, it has also made me totally lose what little knack I had of using the phone. Which is why I answered the business line a few weeks ago with the words, “Hello! Hot Igloo speaking! Amber!”
OK, your turn. If you don’t want to answer in your own blog, feel free to answer in the comments section…
Tagged friday five, phones
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