The manufacturer was a Texan man, and he turned out not to be particularly nice. I wrote him a very interesting, entertaining, agreeable email, explaining the difficulties I had in getting to the post office because of my advanced years, and how people here steal any money you post anyway, and how I was poor and didn’t have a credit card; and I offered to send him some amusing stories in exchange for the codes that would get rid of that damn box. The whole thing was a huge effort because my English isn’t very good, and back then it was even worse (because now the internet has made me practise a lot). But I couldn’t soften his hard Texan heart; he responded briefly, coldly, and even went so far as to say that whenever he gave things away, people forgot to say thank you. As if that man had ever given anything away. In an attempt to win him over to humanity a little, I wrote back, thanking him for having replied, and ended up repeating ‘thank you’ in a sarcastic-sounding way. I was very frustrated, and obsessed with finding a solution. There was no similar program online; nothing matched what I was looking for. I tried making a dialler myself, but I didn’t have Visual Basic back then, and nor did I know enough to be able to do it.