Hanging on the telephone

A wonderful thing about my new phone is that I can record new ringtones for it. A terrible thing about my new phone is that the ringtone is me saying "blah blah blah" increasingly offensively. Having listened to this a few times I can truly say that I don't love the sound of my own voice.

"Blah blah blah" has punctuated the peace of the office several times today. First, the salesman who organised our phone called up to tell me he wasn't organising our internet, after we got somebody else to organise faster internet for us, more quickly.
Second, my estate agent called up, to say he'd be taking us out to lunch tomorrow.

Then a woman phoned up from the "rrrdential" insurance company. (I don't enjoy the best sound quality on my phone, apart from the perfectly reproduced blahs. She wanted to sell me some sort of financial product with a 50% per annum return. She asked me my date of birth. I said it correctly, and she repeated it back wrong. I said it wrong, and she repeated it back right. I said it again, and this time only mouthed the last two digits of the year at the phone instead of speaking them. She began to get flustered. She asked me what my name was.

When somebody calls you up out of the blue, asks for your date of birth and your name, you probably shouldn't tell them. I asked where she'd got my phone number from, and she said from some competition I had entered. Which I haven't. So down went the phone on that.

Finally, I called my ex-landlord in Hong Kong to ask about the return of our deposit, and spent ten minutes being bounced from hold music to hold music, until they told me that I was going to have to pay for the door I removed.

We took the door off the hinges in the kitchen two years ago, then lost the screws. I kind of feel that having to endure three months of a knackered lift and continual hammering for six months, in an apartment that was gradually falling apart under the vibrations, might possibly mean we'd have some leeway, but apparently not. However, it takes three weeks in Hong Kong to find a person capable of rehanging a door (hammerers and drillers are two-a-penny, but as ever a good hangman is hard to find), so I won't find out what gory chunk of the deposit is going towards fixing the door until Friday.

Somehow, things were more civilised when we only had carrier pigeons, weren't they?