Telephone lines

I have previously discussed, in this blog environment, literature inspired by or related to work (see Working Titles, among others).  During the hours I am obliged to devote to my market research call centre work (employment for which I am grateful, but which I would never encumber with the label of 'inspiring' ) a refrain from WH Auden's lovely The Fall of Rome runs incessantly through my mind: 

Caesar's double-bed is warm 
As an unimportant clerk 
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK 
On a pink official form.

I hereby offer an embarrassingly trite poetic work response of my own, in the form of three limericks bemoaning the lot of a telephone market researcher which, if nothing else, may have rarity value in their combination of form and subject.


The request, which we make to a tranche
Of companies, (Head Office or branch)
To ask them some questions,
Provokes some suggestions
That would make a contortionist blanch.

A Market Researcher from Herts
Conducted his surveys in farts,
(Although he used wheezes
And belches and sneezes
To convey the more technical parts).

I'm sorry, she can't take your call;
She's recently had a great fall,
Been kidnapped by Cossacks,
Has eloped to the Trossachs
And is trekking through deepest Nepal.


I humbly invite you to render your own work into limerick form, and thereby make the publication of a quirky Christmas best-seller a virtual inevitability. Huzzah! We shall be rich.