None of us is immune. We all get them and they always seem to arrive at the wrong time. Phone calls from companies doing telemarketing. The suburban newspapers are full of employment opportunities from telemarketing companies. It's been going on for a long time, but lately, these calls have increased mainly because of advances in communication technology allowing high volume input from low cost countries like India.

We at Gear Plus have begun our own little survey. It's hardly scientific but it does highlight a few interesting points. Here's how the master plan goes: Whenever we get a call from a telemarketer, where the line is a little distorted and it's obvious the caller has English as a second language, we quickly unveil our secret weapon. We think of something that has been a major news item Australia wide and then ask the telemarketer if they know about it.

For example, a couple of days after the Australian elections, we received a call from one of the phone companies wanting to do yet another survey (sales plug). We asked the woman if she was from Australia. In her very best Indian accent, she said she was calling from Melbourne and very quickly reeled off a street address, as if she was reading it. So we asked her, did she vote. She asked what we were talking about. We said, everybody in Australia has recently had to vote for something and again we asked, did she vote. She said she didn't know what we were talking about. We suggested that there was a major political event that had just happened in Australia and that she obviously knew nothing about it. We then asked again if she was calling from within Australia. That's when the phone went dead and we chalked up another overseas telemarketing call.

Our highly developed system of testing for fake Aussie's telemarketers has come up with a number of statistics:

• Approx 46% of overall telemarketing calls we receive are coming from overseas.
• 79% of all the telecommunication companies seem to employ telemarketing operations overseas.
• 96% of all telemarketing calls will intrude when you're already on the phone to someone else.
• 0.01% of all telemarketing calls will engage in discussion about anything remotely interesting.

Give our test a go yourself. You will be surprised at the statistics you come up with.

But really, it gets boring. Much easier to just hang up on the bastards.