JACK TAME
Ido wonder, if faced with the quandary, a jury might reasonably acquit someone of murder on the defence that they’d been pushed into a rage by a telecommunications call centre.
After more than an hour on the phone with a score of clueless attendees reading lines from faux-empathetic scripts, I wasn’t just grumpy or sweary.
I was full-noise, fifth-gear, hold-meback, pissed.
And having been told emphatically by my internet provider that it would be a full 2017 month until a technician could visit and install for me a basic connection, I was all the more surprised the next afternoon to be startled from my sleep by a man in an orange vest standing at the end of my bed.
“Oh!” he said. “Sorry! I didn’t know anyone was here.”
It takes a good few minutes to wrench oneself from the profound depths of an afternoon shiftwork sleep. Bewildered, I blinked.
“There’s somebody in here sleeping!” called out the man in the vest, as his similarly vested colleague joined us in the bedroom. “We’re here to do internet.”
In most circumstances, this unexpected interaction would easily be avoided. In most circumstances, internet technicians work in freestanding houses and businesses, and not in large apartment buildings where visiting contractors are occasionally provided master keys by the building management.
In most circumstances, the internet box and connection is not located in the wardrobe of the master bedroom.
In most circumstances, internet technicians would wake any sleeping residents with a knock or a ring of the doorbell.
Perhaps most critically for this particular pickle, in most circumstances, a slumbering resident would not find himself startled by two strangers in orange vests, without a most critical modesty.
I am a naked sleeper. At night, I sleep naked. In the afternoons, I sleep naked.
Those familiar with my physique and complexion will appreciate it isn’t something I do for vanity’s sake. But can you blame a guy for enjoying Egyptian cotton on flesh?
Dazzled by my visitors’ vests, I clawed to my senses. Subtly, I slipped a protruding femur under the sheets.
“I get to work?” one of my visitors asked. “Umm. Sure . . . ” I stammered, throwing my head back.
Anyone who questions why I didn’t just ask for a moment’s privacy is still underestimating my rage at a proposed month without basic internet.
The technician got to work. He pulled shoes from the wardrobe and laid a few coats next to me on the empty side of the bed.
A whisk of a duvet from total humiliation, I tried to act as though all of this were normal and pretended to check my phone.
We were five minutes in before there presented an opportunity. With his nose in the wardrobe and my duvet un-tucked, I pulled the cotton around my body and made an all-or-nothing break.
Softly, silently, I shimmied down the bed and reached for my drawers, careful not to disturb in the slightest his resting toolbox of kit.
If the man who found me in naked glory is reading this right now, he should have no idea the customer he woke was sleeping without clothes.
Mercifully for all involved, I made it across the room. I made it to my drawers.
And the internet works a treat.