Though it is difficult for anyone to say they love any sort of phone solicitors, except perhaps the people who work in the industry, the ones I love the most are the professionally recorded messages that are easy to hang up on. The people who use automated messages for their phone solicitations truly have a heart for the people they select to bother with the cheerfully annoying invitation to take up their offers to install satellite television, renew car warranties, or answer an urgent imperative to seek out debt consolidation credit card services. For these calls, I can usually get the phone back on the hook by the time the professionally recorded announcer can finish saying, "Hello!" The automated messages often have a short delay in the voice activated response, so I can sometimes get back to my business without hearing anything at all.

When I am not available to perform the hang up ritual, the automated messages can chew up quite a bit of space on the answering machine, but the messages are still easy to forward through and delete upon recognition. The second best solicitations are the ones with live operators that get right to the pitch without trying to be overly friendly, so I can interrupt their script reading by telling them I am not interested in hearing about what they are selling over the phone. This is somewhat dependent on hearing the operator thank me, and say good bye once they get the bad news that I will not be interested in becoming their customer.

Both these methods are quick, clean, and straight to the point without reaching a level much more irritating than a bee sting. Of course both approaches could be improved somewhat by varying the script a tad for the second or third time they contact me, especially if the systems are primed to contact me several times in one day. It might also be nice to be able to tell my friends on the no call lists about a fresh joke, inspirational thought, or interesting fact I received from my regulars before they launched their sales pitch.

The robotic live operators who greet me and ask how I am doing with a tone that reflects an absolute certainty they do not care about my response make it easy to refuse to listen to anything they have to say about whatever they are selling. Their approach could be improved by going right into the script without wasting time getting to the refusal.

My most hated solicitations come from service providers, phone companies, financial advisors and newspapers that should be the most sensitive to my lack of desire to upgrade their services or expand the amount of my dollars they are stuffing into their pockets on a regular basis. The "only a few dollars more per month" approach to adding on services I should already be getting for my loyalty to these companies sets my blood boiling almost instantly. When a solicitor starts talking about a newspaper subscription like it is the first time I have ever heard of a newspaper delivery service, and will not take no for an answer, my instincts tell me it is butt kicking time.

Phone companies do not offer me the courtesy of providing an English speaking service representative to solve my troubles with their offerings, but harass me with pushy phone solicitors who carry the conversation to the point of asking, "What is it about the word NO that you do not understand?" When these companies do not stop calling after the fourth time you have told them to take you off their call list, rude does not describe the level of desired response in receiving yet another call.

If a solicitor has the nerve to call back after being disconnected, to continue their conversation, images of angry villagers with torches and pitchforks shouting, "Kill the Monster!" come to mind. Enough is enough.