glider18 wrote:
I have to admit that I too sometimes ignore the phone. If I am in the bathroom, or involved in something where I don't want to be bothered, I will often let it ring. At first I thought I was being rude, but in looking at this more closely, I would be rude to myself to answer it when I didn't want to. And yes, the caller ID is a great friend. Since we are onto phones, I would like to share something I do with telemarketers. I learned this from the great educational comedian speaker Carl Hurley. Whenever I answer the phone and its a telemarketer, I let them deliver their sales pitch, then when it is time for me to respond I say,
"They came last night?" The telemarketer will say, "What?" And I respond, "You know, from up there, they came last night." Usually they will hang up. But other times they allow you the privilege to have more fun. Another good comeback is, "Today's my birthday, you know what I'm wearing?" As Carl Hurley says, "You might as well laugh" about life, and I have come to live by that advice. Here is a good telemarketer comeback I came up with---because you can tell with the caller ID if it is a telemarketer---I have a tape recorded audio track of audience applause and pretend like I am some game show waiting for the lucky tenth caller, and guess what, you are the tenth caller. Then I ask some stupid question if they haven't already hung up. So even though the phone can be a bother, it can also be a lot of fun.

Somewhere I have an mp3 of a guy who did something very much like that - it sounds like the telemarketer's real - what the guy did was to tell him that he was a police officer and that he'd phoned a murder scene. Then he starts asking why he's phoned up a dead man "so I can clear you from the suspects list." When the telemarketer tries to end the conversation, he warns him that he's free to end the call if he wants a subpoena, finally asks him "were you his gay lover?" - the telemarketer eventually sussed out the joke, and the fact that the whole thing was being broadcast on the radio.
I like your idea of taped sounds - I've sometimes thought of having a set of maybe 10 soundbites recorded, stuff like
"you have been connected to the ACME call filtering system. To access your client, press 3"
"please state your name and the name of the company you represent after the tone"
"please wait" (followed by muzac)
"YES I'D LOVE TO BUY ONE! HERE'S MY CREDIT CARD DETAILS!....." (sound begins to crackle and break up so that the card numbers are almost, but not quite, audible.
Then I could just sit there pressing the labelled buttons, loudspeaker mode, microphone muted unless I particularly wanted to intervene directly.