Mid-Month Musings: Mum-in-law Messages

Like many people, P and I use our mobile phones for the vast majority of our telephonic communication these days. It’s an often-stated paradox that we make fewer and fewer actual calls, however – our general communication is far more likely to be a text message.

We have a landline for the convenience of my mother-in-law and cold-callers/potential scammers. This means that every few weeks, I get the job of listening to the frequent messages left by P’s mum when he isn’t at home. He never listens to them himself. It isn't that he is callous or a bad son - it's just that he calls her at least once every day and visits her three or four times a week, and she often catches him at home during her frequent calls to our landline, so the fact that he never listens to her messages doesn’t cause any problems.

Since the New Year, there have been thirteen new messages on the landline, one of them silent and nine of them being ‘private calls’ from ‘Cabo Insurance’, a company we have never heard of nor had any business with [so these messages are deleted by me as soon as I hear the irritating AI woman’s voice]. The remaining messages are from P’s mum. There were only three on this occasion.

Here they are, verbatim:

 

Mon 12 Jan 9.34 pm:  …[long pause]…This thing’s gone off….this new thing I’ve got…I don’t know if the television’s gone off…[long pause with sounds of moving about and switches being clicked repeatedly]…..no…..[line goes dead]

 

Fri 16 Jan 10.24 am:  …[long pause]…not very….mungrubster blink…..[long pause]….[tone of part outrage, part panic] …and postman’s put letter through and the thing’s fell off…..[line goes dead]

Sun 1 Feb 12.29 am: [disapproving voice]….I don’t know where you are but I’ve just found a radiator key, so there… [The word ‘there’ is pronounced in the Yorkshire way as ‘theer’]…Bye…[Final ‘Bye’ is said in an extremely playful, cheerful  voice]

 

I don’t know what you make of these messages. Personally, I enjoy listening to the jibber-jabber and trying to work out wtf she means. Whenever I ask her later, she can never remember. Sometimes we will get an explanation during her later conversations with P on the same day, but sometimes not.

Sometimes the explanations are not much more enlightening than the original messages.

And the thing I'd like to know is who the hell Cabo Insurance is and how I can block their calls...

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