YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED
Dear Mary. . .
Q. Can you advise me on telephone eti- quette regarding my valuable time being wasted by friends who consider their time to be more valuable? The callers come into three main categories: 1. The friend who gets his secretary to ring and then leaves me hanging on until he is ready. 2. The friend who gets her children on automatic remote telephones to ring while she directs domestic power from the Aga, and again I am kept waiting_ 3. The friend who is bored in his car in a traffic jam, and fills in the time by ringing me and wasting my time with a call which does not have his full attention, and then cuts off in the middle of a snarl-up, only to ring back and say, 'Sorry about that.'
Powerless, W14 A. Once you have established that a call falls into one of these three nuisance cate- gories, the correct procedure is simply to hang up. When the callers ring back, you can say for categories one and two, 'Oh, sorry. I thought you'd rung off. I couldn't hear your voice at all.' For category three you can say, 'Obviously we were cut off. That's the trouble with car telephones. You can only really use them to convey an actu-
al message. I always find they are too frus- trating for general chat.'
Q. 'Willy' seems to have become ubiqui- tous, acceptable from Radio 4 to the Daily Telegraph to the dinner table. What is the acceptable female equivalent?
T. Q., Birmingham A. This perplexing question was originally printed on the Letters page (27 August). 'Fanny' is on the boundaries of social acceptability. It achieved something of a breakthrough in the late Seventies when a Chelsea hostess threw a party for all the women she knew named Fanny and all the men she knew named Willy in the hope of forging some permanent relationships_ In recent years, however, the expression 'front bottom' has gained most currency amongst the sophisticated. It was first used in a national broadcast by Dame Edna Everage in 1990 when talking to Douglas Fairbanks jnr about his relationship with Joan Craw- ford. On the subject of the pet names they used, Dame Edna asked Fairbanks, 'And did you have a special name for her... front bottom?'
Q. I am a member of a prominent London club. I have been put in a difficult position as another member, whom I like and admire, has asked me to second his nomi- nation for membership of someone whom I consider unsavoury. How should I refuse without invoking the enmity of both men?
Anon A. Thank you for your esteemed query. The solution to this dilemma is to say, with a grimace, that regrettably the chairman of the selection committee has been trying to oust you from the club for some time because of a personal grievance — a matter which is highly confidential, of course. For this reason you consider it would be unwise for you to put your name as seconder.
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