Well now actually we have a couple of approaches...

1) Usually we just say thank you but no thank you. Please remove us from your calling list as we are already on the do not call list.

2) Sometimes though, when we are in a good mood, my husband and I play a game... The game is "who can keep the telemarketer on the phone longer" (which certainly causes the telemarketer to lose money on commissions - too bad for them!)

One of my absolute favorites was when a phone company called and started talking about their great package deal. I responded by saying that I had no friends and no one wanted to call me... would you be my friend??? I carried on and on about how sad and lonely I was and how this phone package just reinforced the sadness of my life because every month those unused minutes would just keep rolling over and proving that I was a worthless sad little person with no friends to talk to... (etc. etc. etc.). My husband and I were dying laughing so hard (while not laughing on the phone - cause I sounded totally serious). It took a long time for the guy to catch on...

Other times we'll twist the person's words around and get them all flustered, like if they say a model comes in blue, we'll keep asking what's wrong with purple? Do they have something against purple?

Sometimes when my husband plays along I'll ask lots of questions and then say, wait, tell my husband about your great deal and hand the phone over... Well they have to start their whole spiel over from the beginning, because they can never start in the middle.

My husband is just as bad as I am about having a little fun with them. hehehe I think our record was about 20 minutes.

With an unlisted number and being on the do not call list too, we rarely get those calls at all anymore, so we've sort of lost a fun part of our lives... sigh... I hadn't even thought about that until this post. LOL

Marie