I got to do something I’d always wanted to do today: I turned the tables on a telephone solicitor.

I didn’t bother to tell Bubba that I had a rotting deck in great need of repair over at the Bobcat Lair.

A phone call came in, and the very friendly southern fellow on the line asked me if I was Mrs. Bruns (thereby giving away that he didn’t know me from Jack). I replied, “Yes, may I help you?”

He then launched into a charming and vaguely familiar tale about how his top-notch highly praised crew was doing some work in “your neighborhood,” and they had some time, and were just checking to see if there’s anything we needed done to our house. Conveniently, they were having a sale on decks! He wondered if I wanted him to drop by my house on Braesgate and get an estimate.

Ooh, I was ready for this!

I sadly informed Bubba that I no longer owned the house on Braesgate.

But.

I do happen to be an owner of a residential redevelopment company, and we are always looking for good contractors with whom we can have a long relationship. If interested, all he needed to do was look at the Contractors tab on our website, “That’s H-e-r-m-i-t-h-a-u-s.com! Feel free to download our Contractor Packet and fill out an application.”

“We’d love to work with you, if you fit in with our requirements and are willing to sign our Six Critical Documents!” I chirped.

The poor friendly fellow went from total confidence to confusion. He stumbled and said, um, sure, he’d look at our site. And, um, he’d let “the guy who owns our company” know about it.

Ah, that felt good.

Prediction: We won’t hear from THAT four-star contracting firm again. I was not the unsuspecting consumer he was looking for!

So glad I practiced all that stuff in my training classes!