Telephone Manners

After 10 years (TEN YEARS!) I have finally managed to convince Rob to concede on a point he has been adamantly opposed to for eons. Today, FINALLY, Rob agreed to put his morals and sound ethics aside and allow me to get ... call display.

It may seem like a petty dispute. Believe me, it is not. As my husband is pushed to join the 21^st century and leave the 80’s behind, I have (ever the supportive wife) had to do a lot of reassuring that call display is now the NORMAL thing to have; it is NOT rude and it WILL make my life with two kids MUCH more convenient.

He is skeptical, but I took his (albeit weak) go ahead sign without hesitation and called Bell Canada.

After the cheerful robot, I got a lovely chap with a thick Indian accent who very CLEARLY knows about as much about the North American telephone system as my dad knows about the internet: not a heck of a lot.

After I answered all of the topnotch special secret service detective questions to reassure them that I was in fact the rightful owner of my phone line I was allowed to request a change to my phone settings. (Phew.) (There is a special place in hell for whatever criminals duped Bell Canada and forced them to adopt such strict telephone identity security systems ... but that’s another post …)

“Yes, Hello, Mrs Alyssa Boyd-Henry!”

“Hello” (our phone bill is the only thing that I use the name Henry for)

“May I call you Mrs. Alyssa Boyd-Henry?”

(Good God this was going to take all day)

“Yes.”

Right away, Mr Cheerful from Bangladesh informed me that there was some good news! It turns out by calling to add call display to my existing phone line I would end up SAVING myself some money! All I had to do was sign up for the Bell Convenience 5 Feature Pack and my phone bill would plummet from $71.71 to $71.53.

!!!!

I may have postpartum brain fog but even I could figure out that it adds up to a reduction of NOT EVEN TWENTY CENTS!

It seemed to excite my interlocutor very much. (I suspect he knows as much about our currency as he does about Bell Canada…)

The problem became the 5 features I had to choose from. Dude on the phone read them out to me from a list. When I asked him to clarify just exactly WHAT would happen when I pressed *11 for the mysterious “call privacy identification “ he became slightly anxious and then reread to me the previous sentence,

“well…you press *11 and then the privacy identification is activated. “

Fantastic.

None of the proffered other features were in any way appealing, and I certainly didn’t want to rock the boat by adding lots of POTENTIALLY RUDE bells and whistles to our phone line. Call waiting just might have the potential to get Rob kicked out of the Catholic Church. You never know….

Finally, in a state of impatient exasperation (the kind that only strikes when you are on the phone with Bell Canada for the 20^th minute trying to accomplish a SIMPLE TASK with someone halfway around the world) I said to the guy,

“Look. It has taken TEN YEARS for my husband to agree to Call Display. (TEN YEARS!) If I start adding all these other fancy things to my phone line and the phone starts beeping the next time he’s on the phone with his mother he’s going to take 10 steps backwards and time warp our house back to the 1950s and I’ll be using a beige rotary phone that’s attached to the wall. ALL I WANT IS CALL DISPLAY!”

This stunned him. I could hear him scrambling for the right words as he leafed through the papers on his desk. This was putting his training to the test. He may not know about the special intricacies of the *11 features of North American phones but this man had social skills. After a short break I heard him take a deep breath and as politely as he could muster asked,

“Ah yes…uh…Mrs Alyssa Boyd-Henry I forgot to ask you…How are YOU today?”

Believe it or not, his technique worked. I told him I was fine and together we navigated through the complexities of the Bell Canada 5 feature convenience pack. When it came time to process the changes I was very politely put on hold and quite diligently checked on and reassured every minute or so with profuse apologies about the wait. One time he even asked me how the weather was.

At the end of the day I am pleased to say our phone line has been successfully (and perilously) modernized and I not only made a new friend from halfway around the world, but also learned a valuable lesson in politeness.