Telephones....

Yesterday was an achievement day.

Truly huge amounts of wood got cut so last night I was ready for a quiet one, sleeping.

This is where technology is there to hinder us all.

Now, if you have a business phone line there are people out there with the very thing you always needed but never realized it until now.

Regularly they are on the phone offering you color coded pencil sharpeners or company logo embossed loo roll.

There is no limit to the ideas these people come up with or the lengths their reps will go to to bend the ear of the person with their pen on the cheque book - that would be the multifunction pen, ironing board and barometer, last weeks special offer, of course.

You might think that going to bed would be a means of escaping the constant barrage but sometimes it isn't.

These are bright ingenious people and they have fax machines.

Before going home of an afternoon they will dial in a ream of victims, sorry potential clients, phone numbers and leave the electronic slave to lay siege to the lucky selected client overnight.

These are not real people who ring a couple of times then realise you don't have a fax connected to the phone, far from it, these are electronic zombies that think if the fax machine does not answer it's because you have run out of paper and are so blown away by the last special offer that you haven't replaced it yet and so they give you an hour to change the roll then call again, and again, and again.

So, last night the phone rang on the hour every hour and the answer phone duly recorded the fax machine beep beeping for a few minutes each time.

At 2 am I woke and in my half alert state thought it was the alarm going off. I was half way out of bed ready to put the kettle on and make coffee, luckily management intervened. Otherwise I might have been straight outside taking the chain saw to the telegraph pole.....

Now why can someone not phone and sell me something useful? A machine with auto fax back that sends 1000 pages of fax with "bugger off" written on it in 6 inch letters and phones back every hour on the hour to repeat the message (even if it got through the first time).

That's good technology that would be worth every penny....


R