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Yeah....They should have tried this trick of terrorizing telemarketers.

You may be thinking of Jim Florentine who has appeared frequently on Stern's show. The name of the series is "Terrorizing Telemarketers" and there are 3 CDs out now. For more info:

http://www.jimflorentine.com/home.html

He also plays the "Special Ed" character on Crank Yankers.

This guy is a master at fucking with telemarketers. He has some MP3s available for free on his web site; check them out, they're good for a laugh or two. Maybe also some ideas on how you yourself can deal with them...

Ah, but if you're a twisted nut like me, you almost enjoy seeing a telemarketer come up on your caller id box. It presents endless possibilities, the simplest of which is just to pick up the phone, scream loudly into it, and hang up.

Better idea: Do some of the stuff that Jim Florentine does to telemarketers. This guy is a PRO.

There are lots of guerilla tactics to hurt telemarketers where it counts. Time is money to them, as the CNN article rightly points out. So waste their time as much as possible; every minute probably stops them from bothering maybe 10 more people.

Express great interest in their product and make them explain all the options in detail. Pretending you are hard of hearing or your phone's out of whack helps in this regard.

Bring them to the point of taking your credit card number, then go looking for the card. About every 30 seconds, tell them you are still looking--was it in my purse? No, on my desk? No, darn it where did I put it? Maybe I can find an old statement and just read you the number? The telemarketer is by this time salivating for the sale and will put up with this for quite a long time.

Pretend you have just ordered a competing product with superior features, and force them to defend their product. They surely have a script for this, but if you keep making up more features you will eventually wear them out and make them put their supervisor on the line. Whenever this happens, you should insist on talking to the original telemarketer, since supervisors have more power to terminate a conversation.

There are all the usual tactics that have been covered on /. and other forums ad nauseum (see Jim Florentine's website, Tom Mabe's website, and AntiTelemarketer.com. You can act mentally retarted, or cough uncontrollably, or chew loudly during a dinner hour call, or mix intelligent statements with meaningless babble to throw them off the script.

Have fun!

• Telemarketers continue pushing the product until the person called hangs up.
• If engaged, telemarketers never hang up first.

I RUN to the computer, smiling like a banshee, and quietly hang a second phone's handset in front of a speaker. Then, while patronizing the telemarketer, cunningly play various special effect .wav files like cows mooing, cars crashing and Pee Wee Herman laughing.

Sometimes I deny it all and ask if they're hearing voices.

It's great fun!

But my all time favorite was pretending to bathe Grandpa, get in a fight, drown him and asking the telemarketer for advice. I was lucky they didn't call the cops. You can listen to a pro doing it here.

I get fewer calls from my friends these days...

Well some people do want these calls! This guy seems to have the most fun with them. I get a chuckle everytime I hear the calls he gets.