On Friday I was sacked from a telesales job for achieving the record breakingly useless sum of two appointments out of three thousand and eighty-seven phonecalls. One of these fell through when it transpired that the man I had spoken to had somehow gotten the impression that I was selling windows, which I wasn’t. I could blame it all on the fact that I had strained my vocal chords (they‘re just not used to being used) and caught bronchitis AND a throat infection within the first week, but I’m not going to. I was, in a word, Dreadful. This figure would perhaps not have been quite so bad in itself - just a tad pathetic - had I not repeatedly gotten into daft arguments with the people I was ringing, I’m not sorry at all - I rather resent being told by a man who owns a dinghy hire that I’m something unrepeatable for wasting his time with my feeble job. “Well, we can’t all hire out dinghys, now can we, sir?” didn’t help, and he rang up the manager and complained. Really, though - who hires dinghys anyway? It's not as if they're 'fun'. A yacht I could understand, but surely the whole point of dinghys is that they are only used when the boat one actually wanted to be seen in has sunk? The downcast and kindly man who trained us was not, as I had originally thought, the manager: it turns out he is just kept in a cupboard and brought out when there are new recruits to train, and also when there are not-so-new ones to extract. Nor were we selling kettles, as I had originally been led to believe - that was just a ‘practice script’, and only used in the first place because no-one would ever in a month of Sundays agree to buy a kettle, sight unseen, over the telephone. The actual manager was never without either a cigar or an oversized sandwich (quite often he wielded both at once), and was quite driven and charmless. Like people sometimes seem to, he assumed I was Polish, and seemed to think I was making it up when I said I actually wasn‘t.

On my last afternoon, the list of numbers I was given held the data for the owner of an antique shop in Birmingham. After having telephoned the business, we were required to record, in our own words, their response to our demand to appear at the premises for an assessment of their telephone bill in the box next to their name. Next to this one, someone had written ’did not understand, and started to cry’. I’m sure he didn’t really, but I was tempted to ring up just to ask how he was. I didn’t, because he wouldn’t have liked it - the fact that one has never met a person ‘in the flesh’ as it were, somehow makes the fact that one would care instantly very suspicious. Of all of the saddening aspects that emerge from such a job, that was the most upsetting. Added to which, the fact that I sounded like a chain smoker choking on sawdust would not have helped matters.

Because I had nothing else to do yesterday, I watched The Wicker Man, and failed to understand quite why it is said to be so frightening - how could it be when Christopher Lee looks as if he is about to collapse giggling throughout it? And quite rightly so - I would laugh as well if I were made to wear this:

http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c262/Poppycocteau_/262277.jpg