Bad Energy

So tonight, around 6:30. I'm just getting dinner on the table and the phone rings.

I'll be really honest. Normally, I don't answer my phone. It's just that I spend all day on the phone so I don't feel like dealing with it when I'm not working. If you want to text me, I can handle that. Otherwise, not so much.

Anyway, I was talking and cooking and I guess I was distracted, cause even though I didn't recognize the number, I answered.

It was a chick doing a survey about energy...something or other. Since I'm a generally nice person and I don't wish to be rude to a complete stranger on the phone, added to which I cold call people for a living, I chose to not just immediately  hang up on her. She didn't ask me if it was a good time, probably because 6:30 on a Saturday night is pretty clearly not a good time, but just launched right into her little spiel. She made sure to mention up front that she was not selling anything and I almost believed her. I usually say exactly that when I make my calls as well, so maybe it just struck a chord. (And I really am not selling anything. Really.)

She starts out asking me questions and I just go along. At first. I kept thinking it would just be like a three question survey or something short and then I could get on with my life.  Instead it was these long, long questions where I had to rate my answer between 1 and 5, with 5 being the mostly likely. You know.  I'm more of a to the point kind of person, so I kept trying to answer her before she finished, since she was basically asking the same thing over and over, and telling me to give a likelihood of my doing such or so, between 1 and 5 with 1 being the least and 5 being the most likely.  Seriously. She told me that after each question. When I tried to just cut her off and answer without her saying that every time, she insisted that she had to say it.

I started getting testy. I'm not sure what she was after, but the thing was going on way too long and I had absolutely no interest in whatever she wasn't selling me.  Plus, my dinner was getting cold. My mother, in the background, kept telling me to just hang up on her. But, again, I hate to be rude.

We were nearly 9 minutes into this call, when I decided that I was done. She wouldn't just cut to the chase and let me answer her, she insisted on doing the entire spiel, every single time, and I said, look, I can give this another 30 seconds. She said, with a bit of a 'tude, well, there's quite a bit more than that.  I said, I'm sorry, then, but I have absolutely no interest in this and I'm eating dinner.  She sorta sniffed at me a little and thanked me in a really snotty tone, said goodbye and hung up.

Even though I didn't want to be rude to her and just hang up, I should have.  After all it was actually very rude of her to call me during dinner.