theoddsock.com

I’ve discovered that the real menace of being at home during the day is not the danger of ending up watching the human bear-baiting that is day time television, but cold calling of the phone call variety.

Just to set the scene, I’m extremely pregnant, our stairs are very narrow and very steep, and I have two very young excitable cats who want their lunch.

A few moments ago I was just upstairs doing a spot of tidying when the phone rang. The phone in the bedroom needs charging so I had to go down stairs into the dining room to answer it. While I went down at a reasonable pace, my two very hungry cats went down with me, between my legs so they could take up their places in the kitchen to do the chorus of “No we’ve never been fed, we’ve never seen food”.

Additionally I have a very elderly grandmother in the US, and my husband also has not quite so elderly but nonetheless frail relatives, so it might not be outside the realms of probability that we might be called to tell us that someone was taken very ill.

So I was exceedling annoyed to find that it was Accident Helpline calling to see if I had suffered an accident in the last 2 to 3 years. Gritting my teeth I said that we were not interested and hung up. In retrospect of course I could have pointed out that in calling the house, and with me in my condition and with cats as pingly as they are I could have very easily just have sustained a nasty fall down a narrow stairs on to a hard tiled floor, and that they would be the ones getting sued.

We live in a No Cold Calling zone this covers people coming to the door soliciting for business not telephone calls, but we are also on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS, no not that TPS) which means that these businesses should not be phoning us.

Last week at 9pm, if you can believe it, I got a phone call from BT trying to get us to take up a VISA(!) card with them. This, I was told, was in a effort to retain us as customers(!!). Again the teeth gritted and I said I wasn’t interested. Asked why, I bluntly stated that I had a credit card and I made a point of only having one as I didn’t require an additional one.

Of course I have no idea if other calls of this nature were attempted when I was working, they never came on the two days that I was at home. I could start to become paranoid that this is an attempt to cause me to abandon my plans to be a stay-at-home mum and concentrate on my jewellery business, and return to a nice safe office where no one will call me trying to sell me credit cards and other dubious services I neither want nor require.