The Sh*t L*st

A Slashdot article today on spam vigilantism prompted a comment from someone on how to deal with telemarketers. It reminded me of what we do at the small company at which I work:

We employ a fictitious employee, Dick Bunbury, whose sole job is to have telemarketers routed to his voicemail box. Whenever a telemarketer calls, we tell them they need to talk to Dick. Then Dick's name gets put on their list. And we don't have any other Dicks working in our company (that is, people with the name Dick), so whenever someone calls asking for Dick, we know it's a telemarketer and can send them right back to Dick's voicemail.

It's gotten a little tricky once or twice when vendors have showed up at our office actually looking to meet him!