Number WIthheld

My mobile rang this afternoon. A withheld number. I don’t normally bother to answer these as its usually someone trying to sell me a new phone. But as I’m expecting calls from the Estate Agent and my solicitor, I make an exception and answer it.

‘Hello is that Miss Sanddancer?’ (obviously though she used my real name
‘Yes’
‘Excellent. Good to have got hold of you. I’m calling from Studio 64 (I think this is what she said). You’ve applied via our website to come in for a free photshoot, so when are you free come in?
‘What?
‘A photoshoot in our studio. You applied through Crap Offers R Us website’ she says brightly in her best telesales voice (again that may not have been the exact name, but it was something along those lines’
‘I certainly haven’t’

And with that I hung up and had to explain to the people around me what it was all about.

If she could have been me sat her in my best woolly jumper, she would not have been offering me a photograph of myself, even if it is one of those rip-off services where they give you a makeover by covering you in an inch of orange foundation, coiffure your hair to death and then take pictures with a Vaseline smeared lens so that you come out in soft-focus, looking perhaps more attractive but essentially nothing like yourself.

I’ve seen the results of these sessions before – a few friends were conned into them. They were then pressurised into spending £120 on the resulting photograph, which in which even one my friend’s mother’s failed to recognise her daughter.