If you consider the last few months and think about the unsolicited calls to your front door. Or if you think about the majority of the mail that arrives through your letter-box. Or how about your phone ringing?
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| Letters by the front door? We’re using the back door! |
How many of those knocks, letters, or calls was actually good stuff?
Aha. Now you’re getting me.
For me and my household, knocks on the door or the pressing of the doorbell receives no response whatsoever from us unless we are expecting somebody delivering a pizza.
Friends (the tiny few we have that we socialise with) will text or phone when they are 30 seconds away. Sometimes they stand on our doorstep having to phone to get us to let them in.
It’s not that we’re weird, honest. Well, ok, yes, we’re weird, but it’s just that unexpected knocks on the door are never somebody randomly deciding to hand us £50 notes they don’t want.
Usually they are selling something we don’t want. So, rather than waste time saying no and them not going away, it’s far more efficient just not bothering to open the door in the first place.
This not answering the door seems to annoy our neighbour. She’s a 200 year old woman who spends all day and night monitoring the streets like an MI5 operative gathering data. She regularly tells us that we were definitely in when this person or that person called, yet we didn’t come to the door.
About a year after she first started mentioning it as part of her asserting to us that her nose was firmly in our business, I bothered to say that we rarely open the door because we are avoiding assassins. Heck, it was the first thing that came into my mind.
It was a further six months before she re-clarified that I’d said ‘assassins’ rather than what she’d thought or assumed I’d said, ‘Asians’. This explained why, when she reported to us many times in that six months that people had knocked on our door, she’d quietly say, “They were English, not, you know, not those others.” This is how it is up here with generations of inbred Christian Caucasians not having been exposed to any culture other than their own.
When she realised I was avoiding ‘assassins’ and not avoiding ‘Asians’ she started to tell neighbours I was mad.
However, ‘avoiding assassins’ was within her comprehension. ‘Avoiding unsolicited human beings’ is something she would never understand in a million years. She loves them. She can keep the people trying to sell Sky, Virgin, and various opportunities to switch to a new energy company, trapped for hours on her doorstep whilst talking at them about her neighbours.
Hmmm. I guess there are countless door-to-door salespeople who now think I spend my time ‘avoiding Asians’. Whoops.
It’s not just the unsolicited calls to the door that we avoid. We never answer the house phone.
Actually, we only have a house phone for two reasons. Firstly, because historically you needed a phoneline to carry broadband, and secondly because it’s always good to have a number you can give officialdom that you never answer.
All the calls we receive, and a lot of these are trying to sell us stuff despite us being registered with the people who stop unsolicited calls (yeah, right, like they can stop those coming from overseas!), are dealt with by the answerphone. Problem solved. Now and again we play the messages back and delete them to make space for the next lot.
When it comes to physical mail, I know people can get excited by receiving stuff. Yes, there can be good stuff. But, the bad stuff outnumbers the good stuff. Most mail is trying to sell stuff or it’s asking for money.
There’s still enough good stuff being delivered to warrant me not nailing up the letterbox, but for how long? The ‘postmen may be shot’ sign is almost ready to be planted at the end of the drive next to the ‘Asians welcome here’ one. For now I’m tolerating it. For now. For now.
England's England 