A conversation between one of H’s clients and H. The details have been changed to protect the terminally stupidinnocent.

Dear H,

I did a search on your system for jelly flavours, and I wanted strawberry, but strawberry didn’t show up. Can you fix it so strawberry appears at the top of the list when I search for all jelly flavours?

Yours annoyedly,

A. Client

Dear A. Client,

There are thousands of jelly flavours and the system returns a selection according to your search criteria. By restricting your search to only red jelly flavours, strawberry will definitely show up. Or, if you’re sure you want strawberry, you can simply type ’strawberry’ in the flavour selector.

Yours helpfully,

H

Dear H,

I don’t want to type strawberry. Nor do I want to restrict my search. I want to search for ALL flavours, and for strawberry to show at the top of the list. Strawberry is, after all, my favourite flavour.

Yours unreasonably,

A. Client

Dear Mr. Client,

Would you like the moon on a stick, too?

Yours sarcastically,

H

Dear H,

Yes please, but make sure it’s waxing gibbous and the stick is made of silver birch.

Yours obliviously,

A. Client

I’ve never ever in my life witnessed someone be more keen to start work.

I’m having some windows done at the moment. The chaps are pretty good… clean, friendly, doing a great job (touch wooduPVC). They’ve been in each day this week and made great progress.

Last night, when they left, they said they’d like to make a nice early start today, so would it be okay if they turn up at 8 o’clock? Fine, I said, I’m up and about by eight.

So a few seconds past eight this morning, I heard their van turn up and headed out the back to open the side gate for them. While I was there, I heard the doorbell. They’d obviously come to the front door. So I headed back in to the house, opened the front door and there was no-one there.

**CRASH**BANG**TINKLE** said the dining room. **JRRRRRGGGGGG** said a grinder. **CRASH** said the plaster and brickwork.

Before I’d closed the front door there was a mahoooosive gaping hole in the dining room.

Their tea-breaks are just as quick. Take cup. Drink tea. Get back to work.

Marvellous!

You see this happy young couple…

Well, if they’d not been quite so distracted by each other, and had a little foresight, it would have all been ok…

I didn’t allow the meta-anxiety stop me going up… I went for some real-life anxiety instead…

I didn’t think it could get any worse than my previous experience.

However, on challenging the same other player, a new board which didn’t even contain any vowels. He’s going to start thinking I don’t like him or something.

Now for your delectation…

It still needs a little more work, but if you have a mobile internet device, see if you can get away with it. Put down all the letters you have in a vaguely pronouncable order, and look it up in The Scrabble Cheaters’ Dictionary

Friday afternoon is one of those times where you do the little tasks which don’t take too much brain power, but wrap things up neatly for the weekend.

So, for example, if you had a profile at your local travel company, you might go and update your details.

A simple little task.

But for the love of God (who may or may not exist) think of the travel agents! On their side, they’re bombarded by thousands upon thousands of profile updates at exactly the time they’d like to be doing little jobs to round off their week.

Poor things.

While we’re here… don’t use your phone to send texts while driving…

I went on confused.com to obtain a bunch of quotes for my bike insurance which is imminently up for renewal. There were a couple of very attractive quotes, one from a company I’ve never heard of and another, costing about 6p more from the AA.

I made a mental note to go with the AA and thought nothing more of it.

About 15 minutes later, my phone rang.

“Hello”, said the man, “I’m from Company X, and I notice you’ve had a quote for insurance. This is a courtesy call to find out if you are planning to follow up and take our offer?”

“Ah, hello”, said I, “I was very happy to see that you offered the cheapest quote but I’m afraid there was a quote not much more expensive from the AA which is a name I trust.”

“Are you saying you don’t trust us?” he replied shirtily.

“Um… no”, I replied slightly taken aback, “it’s just that the difference in price was only about 6p, and so I…”

beep beep beep said the phone I was cut off.

Charming.

whocallsme.com now have another entry in their database.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

There were two of us playing, and each of us came up with only one word, for one point. The same word, I hasten to add. I tried a couple of online Boggle solvers, and one of those came up with an additional “LBW” of which I’m rather dubious - sure I recognise it’s a valid abbreviation, but not a word.

How frustrating to sit there for 3 minutes thinking “I’m sure there must be more than this… there must be…”