We have a canine guest for a day or two. The dog in question is young Sophie the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, copper of hue and sad of eye. She is currently covering half of the sofa like Lady Avashight, sleeping off her recent walk around this suburb of Leeds.
As I manfully attempt to focus while penning this narrative, my concentration levels are diminishing due to our furry visitors snoring, along with my wife’s cacophonous phone call. I’m not sure why, but for some reason Karen’s voice appears to raise a decibel or two when conversing on the telephone.
This is fair enough if she’s speaking to those hard of hearing, or the quality of the line is poor. However, at what point does someone decide that the volume of their voice needs ramping up for ALL conversations made over a telecommunication network?
Admittedly, I maybe doing the missus a disservice here. After all it might just have become a habit she grew into, the result of shouting so her hard of hearing parents can make out what she’s saying. The difficultly of chatting to her mum not helped by the fact she only wears her hearing aids for best.
A perfect display of unnecessary loudness occurred yesterday evening during my spouse Karen’s phone call with my daughter Rachel in Canada. Throughout this call (well the bits when she was talking anyway) she was speaking at such volume that Rach could have possibly heard her over in Alberta, that’s without a telephone!
Years ago legacy technology necessitated a raising of the voice for long distance calls. An action no longer required with technological advances, which enable consistent telephone call quality regardless of global destination.
I realise that is an over simplistic observation, as line quality isn’t always brilliant. What I’m attempting to say is when phone line quality is poor it’s as much chance of happening locally/nationally as it has internationally…… Incidentally that’s the technology I’m referring to, not any lack of clarity due to communication issues between the parties at either end of the line, which is a completely different story.
Karen has just finished her call with her friend, so I now only have to contend with little Sophie’s snoring. I predict this will abate in about ten minutes when I start eating my lunch. At that time, the beautiful spaniel will dart from the sofa to sit at my feet, making sad eyes in an attempt to strong arm me into sharing my meal of bolognaise leftovers.
Dogs appear to realise I’m a sucker who always acquiesces when subject to the ‘sad eye’ treatment. Whenever I eat within canine company, they sense within a matter of minutes I’ll succumb to their emotional blackmail…… I can almost hear them dubbing me a pushover after duping me into giving away half of my meal.
I’ve never lived in a house where the family had a dog. I did once possess a Borussia Moenchengladbach football top, but I’m reliably informed that doesn’t bear any real parallels to owning a dog.
Incidentally, when I say I possessed a Borussia Moenchengladbach football top, I’m alluding to owning that teams football shirt. I never have or will knowingly demonically possess any Bundesliga football team kit……. Although, if FC Schalke don’t get their act together soon you can watch this space!
Right, I need to conclude this narrative now, I’m hungry and I’ve got a lunch to be emotionally blackmailed out of.
