>Awhile back my telephone with the answer option broke.
>Because I was busy with other things I didn't have time to replace it.
>It took about a week but I suddenly realized life is a lot less stressed and a great deal more peaceful without it.

Once when I wanted to avoid getting called in for overtime (after four consecutive 12-hour night shifts and with my finacée visiting) I taped tha standard phone company message, "You have dialed a number to which long distance is required" that you get when trying to use local dialing to get a long-distance number within the same area code.

I found out when I went back to work that they had tried to phone me, but when they dialed normally they got the long-distance error message and when they dialed using "1" before the number they were told that it was a local call and they didn't need to dial "1". I never did tell them what I did, just in case I needed to use it again.