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.”