It’s well-known that the present simple is used to describe an action which happens regularly and occurs during an infinite period of time (or a finite but quite long one).
He sells cars.
I go to school.
Those are habitual, repeated actions.
But my question is about the cases when it’s used for some series of actions within a relatively short period of time. For example:
Two friends came to a party and found a piano there. One of them comes to it and tries to play something every other ten minutes. (But he can’t really play it.) So, let’s say that having been there for 3 hours the guy tried to play the piano 9 times. The other guy says:
Why do you try to play the piano? It’s obvious you are not a musician.
Do you find this sentence correct in this context?
One native speaker says the following:
If it can reasonably be considered a habitual, repeated action, and you consider it that way, then you would use the tense suited to that idea. You are at risk of someone else having to opinion that those five 'playings' were really just one incident, with rest periods. He would consider your use of the simple past to be strange. but that's just his opinion. If you can logically define the action as 'habitual/repeating', then OK.
Do you agree with it?
Does it mean then, that it would be OK to use it in a context like this:
A person has been chasing another person for the whole day trying to explain themselves, but the other person has been rejecting the former not wanting to talk. Would it be OK to say?
Why do you chase him all day?
Or if I have called someone today 10 times already:
You call him a lot. Why do you call him so much?
Any ideas?