A strange thing happened today. The phone, my second line connected via the computer and allowing free, if hard to hear and hard to be heard phone calls, kept ringing.
That’s only strange if you know that I just use this line for dialling out. No one knows the number, not even me. So when it rang for the fourth time in the same amount of hours, I suspected the line was malfunctioning somewhat. No big deal but I did feel the need to share this with my fourth caller of the day once he’d asked for a fourth different name for somebody who certainly wasn’t me.
“What do you do then?” the comfy, slightly effeminate voice asked from the other end of the line.
“Copywriting,” I answered.
“Oh wow,” he broke in quickly before I could attempt to return the question. “You must be very clever.”
“Exceedingly! You wouldn’t believe how clever I have to be to do this job,” I said, feeling the need to cover the 300 words I was struggling to cut by a hundred on a local roofing company. “How about you?”
“Entertainment.”
So I have to ask, don’t I? Why, when I’m not remotely impressed by fame, fortune or indeed anything to do with celebrity, am I reduced to a giggling wreck when I ask, “Oh gosh [tee hee], do I know you?”
“Yes,” he answers.
Yes! But he’s not allowed to tell me who he is. Awwww. So I draw upon all my feminine guise, explain how hard it is to be alone here every day at my desk, tapping out highly charged, fiendishly intelligent copy, and how I really won’t tell anyone, honest. And he capitulates.
“Andrew Bernard,” he says. He was hoping to speak to his agent. “Are you on the internet?” I found it quite endearing when he proceeded to give me the full link to his website without realising that I could simply google him and his would be the top result.
So, Mr Andrew Bernard, it seems you’ve been in everything. You will recognise him. Check out his website www.andrewbernard.tv. You can even listen to him speak, the voice which spoke to me, in my home, on the line that sits clothed in dusty cobwebs, not un-reminiscent of the phone to the Carlsberg Complaints Line. That’s the voice which made me laugh out loud before I got back to my roofer and the one hundred words I began shifting with renewed vigour.
Thank you, Andrew for making me giggle, and all the very best for whatever project you were hoping to discuss when you accidentally called little old me.
