En Passant: The story of a telesale call

MY CELLPHONE rang, it was an unfamiliar number. If cellphones have one advantage it’s that you can tell who is calling. “Hello,” I said, “John speaking.” A voice, a female voice, a voice that made me suspect the owner of it had roots in Mitchell’s Plain in the Cape, said,

“Is that Mr … ” and the manner in which she pronounced my name cannot be spelt. Karig-rik-gee, something like that, with a guttural “g”, like she had a severe cold and there was wad of a dead-oyster-type of phlegm she was clearing from her throat.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Is that Mr…” and again she attacked my Celtic origins, this time in a manner so vicious that I could distantly hear William Wallace, the hero of Braveheart, spinning in his dank Scottish tomb.

“You’re going to try to sell me something, aren’t you?” I said.

“No…” she began to say.

“How,” I asked, “can you try to sell me something, an act that presupposes the establishment of a relationship between us, when you cannot even pronounce my name?”

“Um…” she began again.

“Listen,” I said, “is this conversation being recorded for… what do they call it..? for ‘quality purposes’, something like that?”

“Yes, it is,” she admitted.

“Then listen, Doris, when we’ve finished talking, call your supervisor over and get him to…”

“It’s a her.”

“…get her to listen to it, OK? Now, I assume that you were given a list of names and numbers to call and my name happened to be on it. Tell your supervisor that if there is a difficult name to say like, for example, McConaughey or Molotkovskiy or perhaps an Indian fellow called Chakrabarti, or maybe a Mr Mkhwanazi, or even a name like mine, tell her that you need to be told the correct pronunciation if you are expected to establish a connection, a relationship, with the potential customer. Trust me, Doris, if you want someone to buy something from you, don’t screw up your sales pitch by screwing up their names.

“Now,” I said, “who did you want to talk to?”

“Umm, Mr Karr…”

“Say after me, Doris, Mr Car…”

“Car…”

“Neg…”

“Neg…”

“E, as in elephant.”

“E…”

“OK, now, altogether, Car-neg-e.”

“Carnegie.”

“Well done, Doris, now, what do you want to sell me?”

“Well, I’m not selling anything, your name has been selected…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, pull the other one, Doris, it’s got Bells on it. Now listen, years and years ago, before cellphones…”

“Before cellphones, Oom?”

“Ja, I’m talking back in the 1970s, back then the equivalent of the job you’re doing was done by people, usually men, going door to door on evenings and over the weekend, and they were selling encyclopaedias.”

“What’s an encyclopaedia, Oom?”

“Stone me! Encyclopaedias were like the Internet in book form, Doris, and a set of them was about 20 thick heavy books with anything you needed to know inside. Anything, from A to Z, from aardvark to zymurgy.”

“Zy…what?”

“Zymurgy. The study of fermentation, as I understand it, Doris.

“Anyway, what these salesmen used to say to you to begin with was that you were lucky enough, from the whole neighbourhood, from the whole town, from the whole country, damn it from the whole world you were lucky enough to have been selected to receive these books.

“No, they said, they weren’t selling them, perish the thought, the books were absolutely free and this publishing company was prepared to put them in your home, for the benefit of your school-going children, and for a small handling fee, a small monthly fee of your arm and your leg, just sign here, and here and here.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone. “Hello?” I said.

“Ja, I’m here, Oom,” said Doris.

“Well, anyway,” I continued, “a couple of days later a box would arrive, a box weighing as much as your mother-in-law, and inside it was not your mother-in-law but a set of big, thick, heavy books, 20 or more of them, containing just as many words as your mother-in-law, although more varied and a lot quieter.

“I know all this, Doris, because one Saturday afternoon back in the 1970s, some bloke with a briefcase wandered up to the garden gate while I was cutting the lawn, and he got talking to my missus, also funnily enough called Doris, and next thing I knew I’d been summoned inside, and before you could spit and say ‘sawdust’ I’d signed on the bleeding bottom line. And he said he wasn’t selling anything.”

There was another silence from the other end. Then Doris said,

“Mr Carnegie, I’m sorry I bothered you. I hope you have a lekker day further. Tot siens.”

And she put the phone down.

I never did find out what she was selling.