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Whew! Today (and yesterday) ended up being somewhat stressful in
that the editing of our two chapters just seemed to go on and on -- as did
distractions galore. Our editor is suggesting further rewrites, and I really
hope we quickly reach a consensus soon on a content so we can move on to
the other chapters.
One weird incident during the day occurred when I went from one phone (talking
to my brother-in-law) to another (a call from my co-author Tom), when the
first phone rang again. Edward, our son, answered. After a while, I began
to get distracted from my conversation with Tom and had to finally ask to
get back to him, because I could hear that Edward was having problems. Finally
he burst into the "office" quite upset, saying that this man was threatening
him with lawyers and really telling him off.
I went in and took over the call to figure out WTF this was. After some language
confusion, I discover that this was apparently some sales representative
to a Swedish company with offices in Malmö, who was at a trade fair
in Germany, and who was furious at us for calling him in the middle of important
business meetings. Say what? This was absurd, but he was initially
not listening much to any denials, only demanding to know who the hell we
were, and ranting on about how this was really making a mess out of the most
important trade event in 6 years.
Eventually, the situation clarified. This man, a Swede, had been getting
constant calls on his mobile, many times a day, for the past six days at
the trade fair. In his meetings, he had the phone turned off for calls as
such, but it would still "beep" loudly and present the calling number for
him to evaluate if it was important enough to break off and answer. The number,
it seemed, was ours, and being unknown to him "not important", but increasingly
aggravating. Finally, his patience wore out and he phoned the number and
blew up the first person who answered.
In due time he wound down to an apology, but we could not figure out why
he kept getting "our number" as the calling party. My initial suspicion is
that the number may have been "ours" right, but wrong area code, but he was
not terribly receptive to suggestions or even letting many words in edgewise
in his tirade, so I didn't insist. It's not the first time that this sort
of thing has happened, i.e. people phoning what they assume to be a local
number, but forgetting to check the area code. He claimed that calls to his
Malmö number were being forwarded to his mobile, so what looked like
a local number he assumed was originating from Malmö. Hmm, I wonder.
Maybe some other office was forwarding calls too, or the exchange was stripping
the area code -- I really don't know, but the whole episode was quite surreal.
Fools are all who seem to be, and half of those who
don't.
|
See the
update-link (above) that points where I last added
some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you
may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once
since you last visited, but that is easily done.
LeufNet