Last week, the Federal Trade Commission set up a National Do Not Call registry so people who register their phone numbers will no longer receive unwanted telemarketing calls. There was some slight interest in this service: 7 million numbers were added the first day and the FTC had to scramble to add more resources to keep the site from crashing.

It seems people really, really hate telemarketers. Who knew?

(It was ironic, however, that the confirmation e-mails that the DoNotCall.gov Web site automatically sent out upon registration were initially interpreted as spam — unwanted electronic telemarketing — and tagged by several Web-based e-mail services.)

I was one of those 7 million registrees. Actually I was three of them, since I registered my home phone and our cell phones. And yet, in some ways I'm going to miss telemarketing. It was dependable. It was a connection to a larger world out there, a world that desperately wanted to talk to me about my interest rates.

I'll have to set my alarm more carefully, since now I have a chance of sleeping past 8 a.m. without being awoken with exciting news about aluminum siding. Long, leisurely, uninterrupted showers are going to show up on my higher electric bill. I anticipate a noticeable weight gain from completed dinners, and we'll have to find an acceptable substitute for the utterly trustworthy birth control offered by the alert and eerily well-timed credit card company sales force.

Most of all, I'll miss the entertainment value. Unwanted calls can be annoying, exasperating, and frustrating. But if you were in the right frame of mind — playful, whimsical, malevolent — it might have dawned on you that you had a captive audience on the line, one that was determined to stay there until their message was delivered. A prank phone call you didn't have to dial. And since they intruded on you, ordinary rules of politeness need not apply.

If the callers were out of state, I'd ask about the vacation possibilities wherever they were, or the weather. I once had a very long, very pleasant talk with one nice lady in Seattle, a place I've always wanted to visit, about the local club scene.

Calls praising the glories of a particular credit card were met with pathetic gratitude. "Oh, thank you! Ever since my insurance scam went bad I've been so broke you wouldn't believe it! But with your new credit card — 0% interest the first six months, you say? — I can work on this new gig I've got cooking. Thank y- hello?"

A friend of mine named Brian delighted in seeing how long he could keep a telemarketer on the phone. He'd pretend to be wildly interested in their product, asking questions and gasping at all the ways their product would improve his life, and he'd excuse himself to get a pen. Then the battle of wills would begin. He would wander around the house, visit the bathroom, play video games, and then dash back to the phone and apologize profusely, saying he knew there was a pen around somewhere, could they please give him just another minute? Legend has it that he successfully kept a vacuum-packed meat salesman on the line for the entire first quarter of the 1999 Superbowl (Broncos v. Falcons), returning during the commercials, but this was never substantiated.

But the most fun we ever had was with a funeral home. Usually phone solicitations for plots and services were met with quick dismissals ("I'm sorry, we eat our dead. Thanks for calling!") but my wife answered during a moment of weakness and agreed to accept coupons for a burial plot we didn't want. She gave our address and a good time to talk, and then forgot all about it until the salesman called back saying he was in our area and looking for our house. Somehow she hadn't picked up on the implied invitation to talk in person.

He was very pleasant and friendly, and certainly the person I would approach to buy a burial plot, but he was remarkably resistant to our polite insistence that we didn't want one. The fun began when he asked Teresa, "If something, God forbid, ever happened to your husband, what would be most on your mind?"

She answered, in all seriousness, "My alibi."

He laughed and said, "No, seriously, have you taken steps to prepare for that situation?"

I assured him that she had, and that, sparing no expense, she had invested in the really good garbage disposal, the one that can handle bones.

Like a judo master, he used that to segue smoothly into why burial was better than cremation as cremation may not always do the job and the skull may be left intact, which was a mistake because he had inadvertently succeeded in getting Teresa interested. "Really?" she said, leaning forward. "Would they let me have it? Could I put it on the mantelpiece?" That led to a furious husband-wife argument, which he patiently sat through, as I refused to allow her to display my skull unless she first got my teeth done.

When further discussions of our afterlife plans and the legacies for our future generations kept including the words "mulch," "reincarnation," and "Hefty Cinch Sack," he finally gave up. We thanked him for a fun and instructive evening.

Since then we have never gotten a call from a funeral home, no matter where we were, which made me wonder if we had been put on their Don't-Call list.