I am getting cross

D'you remember, back in the day, when you used to get junk mail by the ton, and then fortunately recycling arrived and you merely glanced at it before sending it on its way? You'd moan about the waste of printing it, but at least you felt that by recycling it you weren't compounding the problem.

And if you've ever had a fax machine then you know all about personalised sweatshirts for your staff, how many people would like to buy your business (if only), how reasonable car leasing schemes are, etc, etc. But then you found a way to receive your faxes via PC so you weren't paying for the paper to print this junk. You could just glance and delete.

Well I'm now getting really pissed off with junk phone calls. For a long time we've had caller display (admittedly initially so we'd didn't accidentally answer mad ex-wife, but hey). We never answer anything starting 08. In fact we don't answer area codes we don't recognise, working on the principle that they can always leave a message if it's that important. (It's especially important that you DON'T answer HMRC without prior warning of what they might ask you!)

We have one account with two phone lines - one is just a phone, and the other one (whilst being a second phone) is also the fax line and it carries broadband. You have to answer it quick if you want to use the phone option as the fax cuts in after 2 rings. If I HAVE to give a phone number to someone that I'm not sure of, I give them that number. They soon revert to writing if they really want to get in touch with me.

About 18 months ago we changed from BT to TalkTalk. I know, dubious whether that was a good move or not but BT had become SO unreliable. They were especially bad at broadband speed which would suddenly drop and it would then take an hour or more talking to Delhi to get it uprated again. I got to knowing all the phone numbers to bypass the bottom tiers of monkeys but it was so exasperating.
Now TalkTalk is forever ringing me to persuade me to upgrade to broadband on my phone line. Hello, I have broadband, I have it through you, does your left hand even know where your right hand is? It seems the concept of one account, two lines is a bit much for them.

But the phone calls that really piss me off at the moment are the mis-selling PPI ones. Usually they've used an 0845 number so we've ignored it, googled whophonesme,and added it to the list of numbers not to answer. This is quite a long list by now.

But they've recently started to use a new tactic. They've bought/rented phone numbers all over the country. I've always answered local numbers on the basis that it's someone who I might actually want to talk to, even if it's only because they're answering an advert of mine in Trade-It, but these bastards are now ringing using local numbers. And they are really annoying me.

Okay, rant over, I'm sure I need the exercise getting up to look at the phone to see if I want to answer it or not.