Dealing with cold-callers

[danohu]

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.

Comments

[rachelfmb.livejournal.com]

No, but it would probably be a better use of time than winding them up on the phone.

Also, you really really need to read some Marxist theory.

LOL, I bet that's made you even more annoyed :P.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

OK. I'll bite. What Marxist theory is good, and still relevant, and not long-winded or full of needless jargon?

[rachelfmb.livejournal.com]

Mostly I'm interested in the early Hegelian Marx, with the ideas of species-being and human community - I think there is an interesting parallel with perhaps more Christian ideas of co-responisbility (anyway, I've written about this already in my no_ambiguity journal, so won't write it again now).

However, that't not particularly relevant to the subject of your post. I haven't read any of this stuff for years (comment was mainly meant as a joke, in that no Marxist would ever write a post like that). But you might want to look at this and this. Tim sent me these ages ago.

I don't think that theory is generally full of needless jargon. Your argument seems to be. "I can't understand it immediately, therefore it must be wrong." I can't imagine that anyone would make that argument about physics, but it seems to be applied constantly to writings on ethical, political and ontological issues.