I got a phone call on my mobile at work the other day. I didn't recognize the number, but I use my mobile phone for both work and personal calls, so I took the call anyway.
"Hi, is this Michael Raven?"
My heart sank. You can immediately tell from the background hum of a busy call centre, the slightly poor quality of the line and the persons demeanour that they are a telesales operative, using a cheap headset, in a large room full of telesales operatives using cheap headsets.
I don't have a great tolerance for telesales, but I try to be polite initially.
"Yes, it is."
"Great! Now before you hang up, can I just ask two questions, and then you can go about your day?"
This was a different approach, I thought. Two questions is pretty brief.
"Yes."
There was a silence for several seconds, until the telesales person said "Mr Raven?"
"Yes?"
"Am I ok to just ask you two questions, and then you can hang up?"
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes." I said once again with slightly more emphasis, hoping that the guy would pick up that the emphasis was me saying Get On With It.
"Okay, so first question, do you live in a house?"
"Yes."
"Yes?" he said. He seemed surprised, as though every other person he ever asked answered that actually no, they live on a narrowboat.
"Yes, I live in a house." I said, again, emphasis building further. If the emphasis was shown you would have seen a small sign on the ground saying "Yes", and immediately behind it a forty foot swaying tower of large, heavy, jagged rocks, and painted on each rock would be "GET ON WITH IT".
"Now I'm going to ask you the second question, and then you can go about your day Mr Raven, is that okay?"
"Yes."
"So, I'm just going ask this one final question and then we're done Mr Raven, as you'll see it's only taken a couple of minutes out of your day and I think you'll find-"
I don't know what the rest of his spiel was as I was so bored I just hung up on him. I don't know who drafted his sales script but I would have been quite happy to skip the parts where he told me how quick the call was.
But it has made me wonder what the second question was - while it was probably something like "Do you want to save money on your home energy bills?" I live in hope that it was actually something far more exciting like "Would you like to have in your home a cat that knows karate?"
What do you think the second question was? Feel free to drop your second question in the comments below :)
Finally, thanks so much to everyone that's subscribed to this blog via email or via an RSS reader, I just seen that I've now got over 300 subscribers which is really awesome :) If you don't subscribe yet but would like to, there should now be a "Subscribe by Email" box at the bottom of every page of the blog, with a Subscribe button, or if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe through that. Thanks again!
The caption for an RSS feed. Exciting stuff!
