Pros and cons of telephone service

Quiet day today; shifting gears back towards work (which I did a fair amount of today, but tomorrow afternoon I'll be back in the office, which is fun but different). I got an automated phone call from the library that a book I'd put a reserve on had come in -- one of those Austen adaptations; this one's called Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman -- so I drove down and picked it up. Drifts of dry yellow leaves were scuttering across the streets in the wind.

That phone call was the only good one for days. During the dinner hour, we get at least two or three phone calls a night urging us to vote and vote soon (a downside to the vote-by-mail system), and tonight I got a highly biased automated ad posing as a survey. The third question was essentially whether I would mind if Oregon, like Massachusetts, started "teaching the homosexual lifestyle" to kindergarteners. And the "do not call" lists don't affect any of this. It's tempting to take the phone off the hook until November 2!