I confess to being a fan of Room 101 on television, although I missed the now infamous episode where Ann Robinson suggested putting Wales into the Room.

Perhaps I'd better not say any more about it. I have a Welsh colleague sitting not three yards away at the next desk and I'd swear she was already glowering at me. Maybe it's that Celtic sixth sense at work.

I'll only add that I found it odd that a few weeks before Des Lynham put France in, and I don't recall one single complaint to the racial discrimination board.

We're really not ready for Europe are we?

The nice thing about Room 101 is that you can sit there compiling a list of what you would drop down that hatch with a resounding thump.

Mine would include microwave chips, frozen lasagne, leggings in any colour other than black and people who drive cars which thump out loud music (along with the car itself).

Refused

I think we should inform those who insist on driving around followed by a trail of noise which sounds more like a herd of elephants on the rampage than anything resembling pop music that loud car stereos have gone out of fashion elsewhere in the country, along with ghetto blasters and men wearing small greasy pigtails (another candidate for Room 101 if ever there was).

I did suggest to a colleague the other day while filling up with petrol that he should walk across to the car next to us and suggest they had a nasty knocking sound in their car which ought to be attended to, but he refused. Pulling rank never did work in this office and besides, there were six fairly large youths in the car.

Top of my list, however, would be answerphones.

There was a time you could quite comfortably forget to ring people - you're mother, your Great Aunt Jessica or your boss, and swear blind that there was no reply. There wasn't a thing they could do about it, even if they didn't believe you.

Now you get the third degree. 'What time did you ring? How many times? Why didn't you leave a message on the answerphone? I was out between twelve minutes past two and ten to eight but the machine was on so I can't understand why I missed you.'

Saying you rang and they were engaged won't work either, incidentally, because people have those dreadful 'the caller knows you are waiting' tinny voices so they know when people have rung when they are on the phone.

Then there is that little matter of cost and a sneaky one at that. Before, if you made eight calls and seven people were out and only one in you paid for only one call. Now you pay for all eight if they have answerphones. And there's no guarantee they will ring back so you ring again and get the machine again.

Nervous

I suppose I'm really biased against these things because faced with one I turn into a nervous wreck and always have done. For a start I always begin my stumbled message before the bleep and then have to repeat half of it, then I usually forget something and have to ring back and I always find it difficult finishing the message. Do you say goodbye to an answerphone?

Answerphones are also responsible for giving those who rely on them a raging inferiority complex if they discover when they play their machines back that nobody has bothered to ring them. In they trot, after a night away, press the button and discover there is not one message recorded in the past 24 hours. Such people find it impossible to believe that they have been dropped from the social circle of the region for such a long time and immediately assume the machine has gone wrong. There's probably a good living to be made out of 'mending' dysfunctional answer machines which have merely been left idle for a weekend because nobody wanted to speak to their owners.

The worst thing about answerphones is, however, the message itself.

A few years ago I wrote about this, mentioning several of the more irritating messages (including a friend who for some reason had recorded a message in a broad Australian accent so that you thought you had got through to a sheep farm in Alice Springs).

After that I had several telephone calls from people of the 'get a life' variety asking me to ring back so I could listen to their messages and one from someone who swore they were in the process of rehearsing their parrot to take part in their message. Were they kidding? Probably not.

Now the novelty has worn off you would think most people would have fairly sensible messages but you still get the gales of laughter, the stuttered er ums, the curt 'ring back I'm out' and the ones people made at 1am at night after a curry and a goodly amount of lager and then forget to erase.

Some messages indicate that the recorder has long held but frustrated acting ambitions. A well modulated Lord Olivier voice from someone who usually has a charming Cornish accent. All those faintly American West Coast accents 'Hi there, Cindy and Jason are not able to speak to you right now but they'll get back soonest. Have a nice day.'

Orders

The ones I find most irritating are the 'John and Sue can't come to the phone right now but leave your number and we'll get back to you'. Why can't John and Sue get to the phone? Have they lost the use of their legs? Are they in the next room doing something more interesting? Worse still, are they listening to the machine and deciding they don't want to speak to you? Or do they think that they are fooling a burglar who is trying to find out if they are in or out? If it is the latter it's about as useful as leaving the light on in the hall when you go on holiday.

You can, of course, use the BT message which sounds like a terribly nice young lady anyone would be glad to give house room to. Or you could borrow my daughter's old answerphone which had a message from a rather strict sounding German lady barking out what appeared to be orders. The first two times I got the message I attempted to apologise in my inadequate German for getting the wrong number. It took weeks for her to find out how to override this message to put her own on.

So back to the beginning and in will go answerphones and their messages.

We do have an answerphone at home, which I have no truck with, haven't recorded a message and have no idea how to retrieve messages.

Actually, for about a year we had the ideal answerphone in the house. My little grandson developed an obsession with answering the telephone when he was about two. At the first ring he would rush into the hall shouting 'I get it', followed by a bit of a tantrum if anyone else picked it up. The unfortunate caller would then be subjected to a repeated chant of 'hello' which we knew, but they didn't, would continue until they said 'goodbye'.

Yelled

It was often tempting to stand and listen to this increasingly desperate conversation but usually we yelled 'say goodbye to him' at the top of our voices.

He seems to have lost interest in answering the telephone at the moment, but it may not last and now his vocabulary has considerably improved the caller might get a 20 minute rundown on what went on at nursery that morning and what he's having for tea before he reluctantly relays a message to the rest of us.

Now that's what I call an answerphone.