Old Gnu wants to give you some tips on how to deal with frustrating situations.

Today he would like to give you some tips about cold calling on the phone where real humans are at the other end. He is discounting bogus automated messages from the supposed Inland Revenue about some horrendous amount of tax you owe and the like. Genuine human cold calling usually starts with greetings before the sales talk: “Hello, how are you today?” Old Gnu has been busy of late with a lot of hammering, banging, sawing and screwing. While thus engaged he missed a golden opportunity when the phone rang just and just when he’d accidentally hammered his thumb. “Hello. How are you today?” Instead of being short like Basil Fawlty – “Very well. Thank you very much. Goodbye.” – he should have used a different ploy: “Actually I’m not too well today. But I have tablets for the prostrate problems. I had to get up 5 times last night. The problem is I make the mistake of drinking too much coffee late in the day. And then my big toe was playing up. Some twenty or so years ago my motorcycle was toppled over by youngsters in a very deprived area of Bristol. They were menacingly jesting and claiming I was Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, the weight of my Honda 125 fell on my big toe….” 

You can tell how desperate the cold caller is to sell his product by how long he is prepared to listen. The chances are he will hang up after a while. Over a period of months you can have a game of seeing which cold caller was prepared to listen to you the longest. Your smart phone will tell you the length of the call. There is always the chance he will listen to you until you run out of bodily functions to tell him about. He may be really desperate to sell. If that is the case, you simply terminate your catalogue by saying, “Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye!” 

Old Gnu is looking forward to the next cold caller.