About 95% of the phone calls on my land line phone are sales calls.
When I feel that the call is coming at a strange time of day I answer
the phone. The reward I give myself for the endless stream of sales
calls is to practice improvisation on the caller. Many of my improv
identities are famous among my friends, especially if they heard it
live.
A few years back I got called four nights in a row from an MCI call center in Oklahoma. After the first night shift heard my improv, they called back successive nights and put my call on the loud speaker as I riffed away on how bad MCI was. I could hear the echo and the chuckling in the distance.
Yesterday I saw the downside of my approach. I got called four times in two hours from the same sales office just to hear my latest improv. Four calls in two hours was too much. I finally used an off color identity and that stopped the calls. (I claimed the call interrupted sex I was having with my father [long dead]).