Success. Finally, I have made someone in a call centre do what I want, when I want and how I want it. I stumbled on the secret formula for getting jobsworths to co-operate quite by accident.
It was an ordinary day. I was sitting in my kitchen waiting for British Gas to arrive to change my meter. The way I look at it, I’m doing them a favour by letting them change my meter. Since I have no meter-changing desires or ambitions myself, their request to rip out my old meter, which works perfectly well, and install a new meter, for reasons unknown, means that they should, at the very least, go to the trouble of knocking on my door when they arrive.
I forgot that no one knocks on the door any more. I don’t know when door-knocking became obsolete but it has. Taxis are the worst. You wait and wait for a taxi and then discover that they have sent a series of hysterical text messages to your mobile phone, before driving off.
On this occasion, the British Gas engineer had been ringing the land line. Unfortunately, I always ignore the land line because it is invariably a cold-caller trying, for the millionth time, to persuade me to claim back mis-sold payment protection insurance — can there be any more mis-sold PPI in the world?
The British Gas engineer then must have knocked on the door inaudibly, because even the spaniel didn’t hear him and she barks when a fly lands in the porch. He then put a leaflet through the letterbox, which the spaniel brought to me in her mouth. It claimed that the engineer was sorry I was not in. This was a damnable lie. He wasn’t sorry.
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