Peter Bromhead: Disaster due to Sacha Baron Cohen doppelganger

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

When an engineer arrived to install telecommunication services in my fancy new showroom, I should have guessed that everything was going to turn Kafkaesque because he looked and spoke like Sacha Baron Cohen.

As he departed he assured me in guttural English: "No vorries, all ist up and running OK."

But once the telephones were connected, I quickly discovered that instead of the usual dialtones, I could detect only a series of faint crackling noises.

Wearily, I rang Sacha's maintenance company, expecting it would promptly respond to remedy the problem.

Not so, in the Kafkaesque world of telecommunications.

Recorded messages informed me that I could have access to a serviceman only via my telecommunication corporate provider.

At last, I spoke to another Sacha. He listened carefully before putting me on hold. Returning, he assured me that everything was working at their end.

When things turn Kafkaesque it's important not to verbally explode. Instead, one has to breathe deeply and calmly explain again and again that the technical problem was at my end.

After a long pause, he suggested that perhaps I should contact their service provider, thus completing the Kafkaesque circle.

I finally made him understand that such a service could only be generated via his department, and he put me on hold again.

Returning again, he informed me "We have no record of sending a serviceman to your address, so I'm sorry, we cannot help you."

I repeated again that they had sent somebody on a certain date to supposedly connect my landlines and I was present and witnessed the work being carried out.

"We have no paperwork, so you must be mistaken," I was assured.

"So I only imagined a telecommunications serviceman turned up and fiddled with my PBAX?" I replied.

This was greeted by an unusually long silence before Sacha politely asked me if he could be of any further assistance.

This morning I received an email stating that "Incident INC0000000666951 reported by you has been cancelled". It wasn't signed by Franz Kafka, but I'm sure he's lurking somewhere in the background.