The Terror of Green Energy

Our mate Ken lives in the same suburb as Adam and I, so we always get any advance warning if door-to-door salesmen are hitting the local area. They always seem to hit his end of town first, so he’s always quick to send us a warning of utility contract vampires on the prowl.

Warnings are definitely required, too. The last time we had door-to-door salesmen around here, it was an electricity company’s doing. They always seem to arrive in pairs, usually so they can throw around a good-cop-bad-cop, nasty-but-nice routine:

Nasty salesman: Well, congratulations! Simply by switching on the power mains at your house, you are personally raping the continued livelihood of threatened species and single-handedly fisting the Murray-Darling Basin.
Nice salesman: So… would you like to switch to green energy?

That’s not even mentioning what the bloody telcos are like. My last encounter with Optus salesmen reached existential levels.

This is why I was not so amused when I arrived home yesterday, to have Adam announce that he’d been attacked by two electricity salesmen as he arrived home from his boxing workout.

“I just told them to come back later – I’d lost too many brain cells that afternoon to communicate properly,” he apologised. “Besides, I lied and told them it was your name on our electricity contract.” WHY THANKS, THAT’S WHY I LOVE YOU!

Thus commenced an evening of anxious waiting for an argument about our utility contract. As the evening progressed, I decided – bugger it. I’m not going to waste my Friday evening arguing with some door-to-door twat about something, especially when I’m feeling sick. So when the doorbell finally rang, and rang, AND RANG, I cowardly turned off the loungeroom light and hid under the couch.

Then realised they’d probably seen me turning off the light, which would only incence them further. Oh dear. To get my mind off things, I ordered some dinner for us and caught up on some of my TV downloads instead.

Shortly afterwards, the doorbell rang again, and I realised my error: was it our dinner, or the electricity vultures back to attack their prey again? “KNOCK OUT THE NAME I PLACED THE PIZZA ORDER WITH IN MORSE CODE IF YOU’RE REALLY THE PIZZA DELIVERY GUY,” I bellowed down the hallway in fear.

There was enough confused noises to convince me it really was the pizza, so I carefully opened the door and snatched the food away. As I was doing so, I noticed two guys over the street walking around suspiciously with clipboards. Although I was incredulous, I dismissed the possibility – surely those guys would not still be pounding the pavement at 9pm?

Wrong. Having seen through my illusion of invisibility, they romped back over the street mere minutes later and began simultaneously ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door. I salted my pizza with tears of terror and screamed at Adam to answer the door (who, by this stage, was cackling uncontrollably on the floor). It had gone beyond mere avoidance to all-out war and there was no way I was giving up.

Overnight, I fell asleep to dreams of Daryl Somers becoming a door-to-door salesman and trying to sell me a renaissance series of Hey Hey It’s Saturday door-to-door (apparently, he’d become that desperate). This jarred into a terrifying reality when I awoke to the doorbell ringing again. These dickheads just don’t give up!

I’ve no idea if it actually was the door-to-door guys returning for another attempt, but I choose to assume they were. And also that I can never answer our front door again. Sorry. If any of my mates are reading this, you’ll now have to…. I dunno, skydive your way into our backyard or something instead. I refuse to submit.

As I was writing this, I remembered I’ve had a similar encounter with a pizza delivery guy in the past. This probably borders more on socialphobia than actual neurotic behaviour, but I’m clearly still an idiot when it comes to this stuff…

Tagged as: Adam, Salespeople