"Good evening, is this President Barack H. Obama?"

Today's favorite space-waster in The New York Times electronic edition is a piece on who has, and who does not have, President Obama's new e-mail address. Apparently this information is of great importance to someone, but I would hope it's not necessarily the editors of The Times. Why measure insider status by e-mail access? I'd rather have the President's private phone number. And if I were a corporate evil-doer, I'd want the one that rings in the dining room while the family is having dinner.

Companies know there's nothing like a human voice to get a message across and in Italy we are just as plagued by marketing calls as the rest of the world. None of us feels bad about hanging up on a canned voice, but a real, live person who's trying desperately to earn a couple of Euros surely deserves a few seconds of our time before we say "No, thank you."

Unlike my brother-in-law, who simply hangs up the phone as soon as he recognizes a sales call, I almost always let the person spin through her or his opening lines before explaining that I am not interested. I wouldn't want to be the straw that breaks the sanity threshold of one of those part-time, under-paid operators.

I did feel exasperated a week ago when I received six live pitches within two days from Telecom, the beleaguered communications institution we love to hate. The most annoying part of Telecom is that their marketing consists entirely of "cold calls" by thousands of slaves who have no idea whether or not you are already a customer, let alone one who is currently utilizing the very service they are promoting. That makes us all cranky, doesn't it?

So last week, when it became obvious that the calls were not going to stop, I simply switched to English and then ended my response with "Grazie! Buona Sera!" The startled operators stopped speaking long enough for me to make a semi-graceful exit and they also had an anecdote to share with co-workers during break time.