This guy deserves a Nobel Prize or something. He created a free, slap-together do-it-yourself product that serves a dual purpose: reducing the efficiency of telemarketers while, at the same time, making fools out of them for your sheer delight.

Have you ever received a robotic telemarketer call? The kind carefully designed to fool you into thinking you’re having a conversation with someone in your neighborhood, and you don’t realize for a while that it’s a recording and they’re selling something? This guy (whom I found via Engadget) took that idea, juiced it up, and aimed it right back at the telemarketers.

Here’s how it works: You start with a pre-recorded conversation with a variety of statements, questions, and generalized utterances. The TeleCrapper 2000 then waits behind your Called ID service with a list of numbers identified as telemarketers. When the phone rings, the Telecrapper 2000 scans the Caller ID against the list. If it’s one of them, then the TeleCrapper 2000 picks up after the first ring. It plays the recorded script’s first line, then waits for an answer. The TeleCrapper 2000 can detect the silence at the end of a telemarketer’s statement, and so it can realistically answer shortly after they finish saying something. The TeleCrapper 2000 then plays the next recorded line, waits for an answer, and so on, and so on. When you hear the conversations it has, it is amazingly realistic, and you can imagine it fooling just about anybody. (Unfortunately, it’s more than just the average person can wire together; hopefully, someday someone will sell a ready-made version of it.)

The idea of this, as I mentioned before, is twofold: first, it completely wastes the telemarketers’ time by engaging them in a protracted, fake conversation with zero benefit to them. Some of these people go on with the TeleCrapper 2000 for quite some time, even after the TeleCrapper 2000 reaches the point where it runs out of material and just loops the same four or five replies over and over and over again.

The second purpose is that it gives you a great deal of entertainment and sheer joy. You can record, listen to, and share the conversations the telemarketers have with your computer, and laugh yourself silly. The creator of this product, who will surely be rewarded handsomely by God, has put up a dozen or so of these recorded conversations on his web site; scroll down to the very bottom of the page and listen to them. Probably the best of this guy’s list is #5, which was turned into a Flash animation on this site. But #9 was a hoot, because the robotic conversation was based on accusing the caller of being “Chris,” and the caller was in fact named “Christy” (another called was “Crystal”). #11 was outright hysterical; the robot conversation simulated a confused old man, and trapped the caller into a seemingly endless three minutes of pure, hilarious nonsense.

But that has nothing on the conversation numbered 12, in three parts, where first the caller is fooled for 3 or four minutes, then believes that he’s talking to a deranged old man and tries to make fun of him with the office listening, not realizing he’s trying to cruelly tease a machine on an endless loop, sounding like a complete fool. Then he calls back and tries again, this time seriously attempting to get the woman of the house before it spins off into absurdity again.

The maker states his desire that many people will do this, and share their own recordings over the Internet. I hope they do.

I tell you, I haven’t laughed this hard in years.