I may as well have ordered a unicorn sandwich; such was the gaping disbelief that greeted my enquiry. For once, I can honestly say that my intentions were good. However, much like anything else that’s good, my intentions come with an expiration date and, like a litre of full cream milk left in the sun, that date was now fast approaching. What I had thought was a simple inquiry regarding a wireless internet device was greeted with the kind of incredulity you’d expect from someone who has only now learned that the world is round rather than flat.
I may as well have ordered a unicorn sandwich; such was the gaping disbelief that greeted my enquiry. For once, I can honestly say that my intentions were good. However, much like anything else that’s good, my intentions come with an expiration date and, like a litre of full cream milk left in the sun, that date was now fast approaching. What I had thought was a simple inquiry regarding a wireless internet device was greeted with the kind of incredulity you’d expect from someone who has only now learned that the world is round rather than flat.
As faces go, this was far from a blank canvas. It was more like the wall behind a shopping centre, where delinquent youths feel free to express whatever half-formed thought happens to leap into their minds. Indeed, the shop assistant’s face was full of confusing graffiti. His mouth was as wide and round as the third hole of a golf course designed for the very same people who demand their books in extra large print.
Worse than than the blinking absence of anything that can be described as recognition was the attempt to give a response. He answered simply and clearly: ‘Actually, that doesn’t exist.’ For my part, I was reasonably confident that wireless internet devices do exist and that dozens if not hundreds of people use them each and every day. The shop assistant was having none of it. So far as he was concerned, I might as well have asked him for a left-handed shovel. Indeed, had I a left handed shovel at my disposal, only a greeting from its back end delivered with speed would have had any hope of breaking the poor young man out of his apparent stupor.
I was left a choice – either I could accept his answer and walk away or I could try to persist. It must be said, it was a highly pressurized situation, one attributable to the fact that you had to queue up for service, but without any people at the service desk to assist. This created something of a bottle neck and I could sense that others in queue behind me were becoming increasingly agitated. In fact, at one point I thought a particular individual had resorted to cannibalism, but with the benefit of hindsight they may well have been McNuggets. I can’t quite be sure, though.
Taking a very deep breath, I decided that to surrender now would be to raise the little white flag on the part of anyone who has asked a sensible question and received, for their trouble, an answer that insulted their frontal lobe and all its friends. I was pretty sure that the assistant standing in front of me with a facial expression borrowed from a startled camel, was probably aware of the wireless internet. In fact, I was reasonably confident that he was familiar with the internet in all its various incarnations. He was, I suspected, trying to fob me off.
Nobody likes to be fobbed off. It insults the intelligence of both the fobber and the fobbee when it happens. But the brutal truth is that there is a growing propensity for fobbism has never been as prominent as it now. Indeed, you can’t dial a call centre and have your enquiry re-directed to Greenland without someone attempting to brazenly fob you off. It is an art that is intended to terminate the discussion with the greatest haste possible without simply hanging up. It was here that my telecommunications salesperson made a fatal miscalculation – he tried to fob me off in person rather than over the phone.
With the words, ‘such a thing does not exist’ still ringing in my ears (for which I really ought to see some kind of specialist), I calmly responded, ‘Actually, that’s not correct.’ Prior to uttering those words, I wouldn’t have thought that a human face could appear more stunned. I was wrong. What remained of his eyebrows took shelter in the depths of his scalp and his jaw plummeted towards the floor. With the assistant now so slack of jaw as to be rendered speechless, he gradually summonsed what remained of his mental functioning and said the words that we all long to hear in such awkward circumstances: ‘I’ll get someone else.’
From the depths of the store he emerged. Short and stout, he had the kind of beard that suggests that he may well have eaten a guinea pig for breakfast and neglected to wipe his mouth afterwards. He appeared to be half man, quarter hobbit with the remaining quarter resisting any attempt categorize it. His personal odour would best described as ‘genre defying’. I explained to him what I was seeking. With no small amount of ceremony, he explained that he had once heard of the magic of which I spoke. His right hand then disappeared behind his back from whence he produced a box that provided wireless internet.
As it turns out, wireless internet is not something I imagined in a dream. If only! Had it been a product of my imagination, I would surely have devoted all my time to bringing my invention to life. I’d need help with the technical aspects of course. Luckily, there are plenty of people in this big old world who offer the kind of technical assistance I need. The danger, of course, is that when push comes to shove comes to call centre that that somebody might try to fob me off. Let me say that they have no idea who they’re dealing with. Unless, of course, they keep records of that kind of thing. But let me say now that I am not for the fobbing.