It never fails: you’re in an important meeting, driving down the road late for something, or just sitting down to dinner, and it happens: the phone rings and it’s a dreaded telemarketer. If I were to put in bookkeeping terms, these vampires do some serious damage to your time equity, and if you could charge them on an hourly basis, you’d be golden. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and we must take steps to protect ourselves. What follows is a list of our preferred ways to keep telemarketers from bothering us that are more effective than asking each to put you on their “do not call list.”