About 30 years ago, I worked in the BBC's programme enquiries dept. as a typist. We all had to take turns answering the enquiries phone, which terrified me because I could never find the answers fast enough. As you can imagine, a fair number of strange people liked to phone the BBC. One boy got a man asking where he could get a rope, so he could hang himself. Heartlessly, my colleague put him through to the stage properties dept. One day I got a very sane and lucid woman who said, "This may sound strange to you, but it is perfectly real to me," and then told me that she was in Hell and needed to speak to the vicar who had just given a sermon on the radio. I put her on hold and tried the studio, but he had gone. When I told her, she sounded considerably more desperate than before. I should have asked her what she meant by 'in Hell' but it was too weird, so I just apologised.
