Smile on Sunday -

What do you do when you are painting and the phone rings? Do you break off from your watercolour wash to answer it and risk ruining your painting or do you let it ring?

I find the ‘cold calls’, especially the automated ones beginning, ‘Congratulations, you have won...’ a real nuisance and they somehow persist even though I’ve registered with ‘Telephone Preferences’. Unfortunately many of them show up as ‘Out of Area’ so I can never be certain that it’s not my daughter calling me from Sweden.

There’s not much to be done about the automated ones except to put the phone down. But then there are the less obviously ‘spam’ calls, where the caller asks not only if you are Mrs Such-and-such but then goes on to ask ‘how are you today?’ – to which I’m afraid I’ve been known to reply that I’d be much better if their call hadn’t interrupted my work (and wanting to add that it’s none of their business.) But more often I interrupt them just as they are beginning to get into full flow to ask where they got my number and politely explain that they seem to be one that has slipped through the Telephone Preferences net. Usually they apologise and say they’ll remove me from their list. But if I’m painting when the call comes, the damage is already done and it can be infuriating.

As ever, I find the best way is to try to see a funny side and the video clip at the bottom of this page, even though it doesn’t solve the problem of the interruption, made me laugh – though I haven’t tried it out yet! 

(If you have time to spare, there are a lot more 'solutions' on Youtube!)