This Is This

I was buying insurance over the phone yesterday (rock and roll lifestyle? check.)

A guy was meant to call be back with an offer for £315, which was lower than my renewal. He said he would call me at one fourty five.

At one fourty the phone rang.

Rep: Hello, Mr. Jones.

Me: Speaking.

Rep: Hello, it’s Daniel from Big Insurance Company, you said to call you back about the insurance quote.

Me: Yeah, that’s right. Three fifteen wasn’t it?

Rep: I’ve got one fourty five here.

Me: One fourty five? OK. Even better.

See reader, I though he was saying £145 instead of 1:45.

Rep: I mean, I can do three fifteen if you want.

Me (laughing): No, one fourty five is great.

Rep: Do you want me to call back in five minutes?

Me (thinking they’ve made some mistake with the numbers and I can actually get away with paying less on my car insurance before the bozos realise): No, that’s fine.

Rep: OK, it’s just you said you were on your lunch break.

Me: That’s fine. I’ll take it.

Rep: So we agreed for me to call at one fourty five.

Me (penny dropping): Oh. Yeah, no, that’s fine.

Rep: So we’re looking at three hundred and fifteen pounds in total.

Me: Yeah.

Rep: And that’s for fully comp including legal assistance, windscreen cover and use of a courtesy car.

Me: Right.

I think some people think I miss the point when I am talking to them. Not you, of course.

It’s probably because my attention span isn’t great. If I don’t look after myself, I have the concentration of a crack baby. I have to read the first couple of pages of a book with a bookmark just to get me reading one line at a time because my mind flits around like a hummingbird on an espresso IVs. This is great for blogging, music and joking around, not so good when packing for a holiday.

I think my concentration is made worse by my surroundings. At work, I have four tvs on, I’m sending and email and having a conversation about something else while I’m preparing for a meeting I have, oh and doing actual work. And it happens, you know. I nail it, but it’s a task to go the other way when it’s called for.

Also, I’m not big on small talk. With many conversations, I get in and out, sometimes I extracting snippets of exchanges for my own information like wounded comrades from jungles.

I can also kill conversations pretty dead with random comments like the cab driver this week who broke a fifteen minute silence by saying to me: “That’s a popular car that one.”

Me: Huh?

Cab driver: That’s a popular car.

Me: Yeah.

Cab driver: Range Rover. Popular car, that.

Me: Popular car. 4.5?

Cab driver: At least.

Me: Very thirs-

Cab driver: Oh verrrry thirsty.

Me: Very thirsty. Mmm.

It’s better to say nothing. Thankfully, I have a gift of saying things sometimes that invokes the perfect conditions for a still and steady silence to develop, like when you get two owls sitting together.

…
…

Like that.

Have a good weekend.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 1:58 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.