Earlier this week, I had loads of stuff to write about, but no time to do it in. Today, I find myself with a spare lunch hour and I’ve forgotten everything I was going to write about. I blame progress report meetings, which have a curious ability to sap all my motivation and reduce my brain’s efficiency to something approaching zero; I think it’s the way you have to boil down a week’s worth of work into a couple of sentences in order to continue to justify your existence to management types who sit several hundred miles away and decide whether you get paid or not – and if you’ve spent a large amount of the week bugfixing, it’s guaranteed to look bad on the report because no actual forward progress is made despite the fact you’ve probably been working as hard, if not harder, than when you wrote the code which needed fixing in the first place.
Ooh, I remember something: We’ve been getting messages on our answering service at home which are plainly not for us. They sound suspiciously like debt collection agencies calling for someone who has scarpered without paying off whatever ludicrous debt they’ve managed to incur. Now, I’d quite like to stop receiving these calls, but I’m loathe to ring them back, because I know there’s precisely zero chance the person on the other end of the line will believe me if I say that I’m not the person they think I am, and that could lead to all sorts of nastiness. So, what should I do?
My earplugs are still missing.
Do call them. The alternative is that they’ll end up sending bailiffs round, and they’re harder to convince.
Call them back, explain, and say you’d like the number deleted, as it’s not you, you’ve been there for x years etc., and have never heard of the person.
They’re used to people skipping on debts, and normally are pretty good about it.
As at least one of the calls was from Manchester housing (calling about unpaid rent) I’m not too worried about bailiffs.
I’ll give them a ring though, anyway, I reckon. It disturbs me when our phone rings, because no-one ever calls us on it, and we only have it because you can’t get ADSL without a phoneline.