Terry’s
three cellphones were lined up neatly across his desk.
The blue
one rang, and almost immediately the other two. He grabbed for the first:
“Hello . . who is that? . . .Terry here”
There was a
discomfiting near-silence with only an interstellar hiss before he heard a
distant voice saying “Terry here”
“No, I’m
Terry. Who is that?”
The other
two phones were still ringing.
He grabbed
at them, “Yes, hello, hello,” he burbled rapidly into each and turned back to
the blue phone to hear the same faint voice asking him “Who is that?”
“Who do you
need to speak to? This is Terry Hardparcel.”
The red
phone answered him: “Hello, hello”.
“Yes,
hello, who is that?”
The blue
phone’s distant depersonalised voice came back: “This is Terry Hardparcel”.
“No, you
demented cretin, I’m Terry Hardparcel”
The green
phone was connected to a pay-by-the-minute astrology hotline that cost Terry £6
while he struggled with the other two.
“Goddam and
bugger everyone in Maintenance!” growled Terry to Keynes the accountant with
the recurring error as he staggered from the disastrous Management men’s room.
“I’d sack every last miserable incompetent bastard idiot if they weren’t my
brothers-in-law”.
Keynes
concurred: “There are five of them doing one man’s job, and that’s six too
many.”
Back home
he said much the same to Angela: “It’s time John, George, Paul and Wolfgang
found jobs somewhere else! I am sick of putting up with them for twenty
years just because they came from a broken home and then broke up every other
one they were sent to. For god’s sake make them find work in something suited
to their minimal bloody abilities like, I don’t know, counting caterpillars!
They’ll give me a breakdown next!”
“Do be a
bit quieter, dear, please. You don’t have to yell it out so that all and sundry
and everyone else can hear you.”
