Another Voice | 26 April 2008

My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world

It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction of a stone table outside our house in Derbyshire. But hardly had I started work than from inside the house I heard the telephone ring. Downing tools, running up from the garden, shedding gloves and kicking off boots I reached it, breathless but just in time.

‘Good afternoon, have you thought about a new kitchen? Our company would be happy to visit free of charge and give you a quote…’.

I cut him short as I’ve learned to — the earlier you interrupt the flow the easier it is terminate these conversations, wasting less time on both sides — and, fighting my irritation, communicated more or less courteously my longstanding, unyielding, implacable, unalterable resolve not to have a new fitted kitchen, or a fitted kitchen at all. He took the news without arguing and I hung up and went back to my work.

But I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He sounded young and (from the timbre and something in the accent) probably black. As anger at the small but futile and uninvited interruption to my life subsides I’m always glad to have managed not to be unpleasant. But every time it happens again (on this occasion it happened again only an hour later: an offer of a different broadband telephone package) the instinct to snap at someone wells up anew inside me, and has to be suppressed anew. One learns to stifle the expression, but never the feeling, of annoyance.