Being nice to strangers
I heard this story, from the horse’s mouth, as it were. To preserve her identity, I’ll refer to her as X.
A few years ago, in Birmingham, X was working upstairs, and didn’t hear the doorbell. However, a few minutes later she thought she heard someone moving around downstairs. She went down, and saw someone in the hall. Fearing that she was about to be attacked, grabbed the closest thing she could find, a biro, and began waving it in a manic stabbing motion, whilst screaming her head off.
The man who had entered her house froze momentarily before bolting straight out of the front door and closing it behind him. He then proceeded to explain through the letter box that he wasn’t going to hurt her, but was the surveyor from the estate agents!
X eventually stopped screaming, and instead turned into a hysterical shaking twitching wreck until her boyfriend managed to come and comfort her about 20 mins later.
She told me that “there was an iron on the ironing board there, but she couldn’t quite reach it”…
You have to feel sorry for the surveyor!