Dealing with cold-callers
Staying with my mother has reintroduced me to the delights of telephone salesmen. During the week, somebody calls the house trying to sell us stuff perhaps once an hour. A few of them are spectacularly obnoxious - the one that put me in a hold queue as soon as I picked up the phone was particularly impressive.
My question to you is: what can I do to them? Either to have some fun, or to make their lives unpleasant. Mostly I'm currently telling them that I'm really interested in $useless_product, asking them to wait while I turn down the cooking/call the homeowner/move to a different room, leaving the phone off the hook, and seeing how long they'll wait. But I'm in desperate need of some better ideas.
Edit: OK, OK. I'm impressed how reasonable and sensible you all are, and wondering how I managed to not run into the Telephone Preference Service. I give in: I'll be nice to them, and do the things that are supposed to make them go away. But grr...I'd love it if once things didn't all come down to politics and economics.
My question to you is: what can I do to them? Either to have some fun, or to make their lives unpleasant. Mostly I'm currently telling them that I'm really interested in $useless_product, asking them to wait while I turn down the cooking/call the homeowner/move to a different room, leaving the phone off the hook, and seeing how long they'll wait. But I'm in desperate need of some better ideas.
Edit: OK, OK. I'm impressed how reasonable and sensible you all are, and wondering how I managed to not run into the Telephone Preference Service. I give in: I'll be nice to them, and do the things that are supposed to make them go away. But grr...I'd love it if once things didn't all come down to politics and economics.