The other morning at 5am I woke to the sound of a recognisable ‘ping’ … it was a message on my mobile phone. I lay in bed, now awake, thinking ‘who would message me at 5am’. Scenarios went through my mind about what the message might be. Before long I was wide awake rehearsing all the possibilities. It was probably a spam message (not the spam you get in a tin that we used to put in sandwiches when I was little, the other type of spam). Anyway, wide awake now I got up and looked at the message. You know there’s a lot to be said for modern technology, but it can also be a bit of a nuisance and take over your life. Take phones for instance, why is it that when that darned thing rings, or pings, people drop what they are doing and leap like a gazelle to pick it up and give their whole attention to the person on the other end …. That’s if there even is a person on the other end! Well I’m a bit of a rebel (or as my other half says, a grump) so often I refuse to be ruled by the ringing and just ignore it. Part of that might be because I resemble neither a gazelle nor a ninja so leaping from my seat has not been part of my repertoire for at least the last 20 years, and if I tried it I would probably end up in A and E. Anyway, there are very few things in life that are so important that they need your absolute immediate attention and response.
However, I did recently receive an interesting lunchtime call. I answered that day, basically for 2 reasons. The first was that the phone was beside me on the table so no gymnastics were required, and the second was that I noticed that the caller was the vicar. I am not in the habit of receiving calls from the vicar so I was intrigued. The conversation started off innocent enough, general pleasantries, then it got a bit weird … ‘how are your husband’s lock picking skills?’ she asked. Well I know there’s a cost of living crisis, and churches have been hit badly by that as well as the effects of the pandemic, but surely she wasn’t planning a heist to supplement the weekly offering! I wondered if I owned a balaclava, and if Jenny next door would loan me her Mini (car, not skirt) in case we were going all Italian Job 2. Then she added ‘we can’t find the key to the filing cabinet and I need to get into it’. So hubby was packed off with appropriate power tools to drill out the lock and liberate the vicar’s necessities, and life went back to normal. Well I say normal, but there’s still the matter of the text message at 5am from someone far less interesting than the vicar!
The message was from a lady who was selling some second hand office furniture. I had asked her the previous day (at a reasonable time of the day) if she had any locking under desk drawers and she was going to check. I was hoping for 2 keys so there was no repeat performance of the lost key debacle as I didn’t want my husband to get an unreasonable reputation as a safe cracker. This was her responding to me. I have no idea why she chose to do that at 5am but since I was awake we had a bit of a text chat and she told me that she did have what I needed, with a key, and I made arrangements to go and pick them up. I didn’t want to wake up hubby at that hour for the redistribution of office furniture, he is a reasonable man but I thought a 5am wake up call in these circumstances might push him over the edge, so I arranged a 10am pickup. At 9am I got another text from the same lady. The drawers had a key but it didn’t actually lock the drawers, would I still like them? So effectively she was saying that these were drawers that didn’t lock and the key was just a red herring, included to befuddle my mind. So no thanks, I didn’t want them. So we are still searching for that elusive set of drawers with a working key, or maybe two, and in the meantime I presume the vicar has her vital office supplies secreted about her person.
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