Thursday 21 October 2010

Failsafe way to get rid of dirty callers

Many many moons ago before I was twinkle in my mother’s eye, she worked for the Samaritans.

(In fact I became a twinkle in her eye once she met my father there.)

As well as going out with a team to visit people in her homes she was in the office a lot, manning the phones and trying to help people in distress.

However they had one nuisance caller, who was making calls of a somewhat fruity nature shall I say.

The official line was given that they weren’t to put the phone down on this gentleman, he could be in need after all, but that they should instead try and steer the conversation away from dangerous territory and try and get him to talk about something innocuous.

One evening, my Mum gets the call. Keeping in her head that she has to distract him she starts to tell him that she’s currently re-decorating her house and that it’s keeping her very busy as there are lots of rooms to do.

He asked her “What’s your hall like?”

Mum was pretty pleased with herself, she had successfully got the dirty caller to stop making sexual remarks and got him interested in talking about home interiors instead.

“Well,” she said to him, “My hall is quite long and narrow with a very steep staircase in it, we have to be careful when we’re coming down it that we don’t fall, and there’s anaglypta wallpaper on it [don’t judge, it was the early ‘80s] and there’s the living room and the dining room off it and down at the bottom...”

At this point the man interrupted...

“Not your hall, I said what’s your HOLE like!”

And in disgust, he put the phone down on her.

12 comments:

  1. Oh bless her, that's so funny. Easy mistake to make! S x

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  2. That is hilarious! Sorry I have missed some of your posts! Been having to force myself into blogland at the mo! Susie xx

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  3. You crack me up !!!!!xxxxxxx

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  4. Haha brilliant!! I used to work in a call centre and the same pervy man would phone up the underwear catalogue order line. Gross. There really are some wierdos out there!

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  5. Ahahahaha! I'm just picturing your mum's face after the end of that phone call...

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  6. Yes I used to work a helpline and got lots of callers like that. Amazed your mum only had the one. We were allowed to put the phone down on them, thankfully. Really opens your eyes!

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  7. brilliant. anaglypta. there's a blast from the past!

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  8. Haha, that's brilliant! There really are some weirdos out there. I used to work in a Complaints office and we had a few regular callers. One rang up one day and told her he had requested a song on the local radio and dedicated it to her, so we tuned in... it was 'fat bottomed girls'! Such a charmer!

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