If you're like me, you hate getting telemarketing phone calls. Even if they doesn't interrupt your dinner, they are just wasting our time because those marketers are running a blanket campaign. They are perfectly willing to have their automated redialer make a hundred indiscriminate calls every twenty minutes. All they hope for is just two sheep who will say yes.

Don't you hate all that spam in your mailbox, too? The excitement of fifty-three new messages dies quickly when you notice that most of them are business, not personal. Commercial bots collect your email addresses off bulletin boards, shopping sites, and "FREE!" drawing registrations so they can now send you their form letters. They don't even do us the courtesy of targeting their ads! Just Viagra, porn, and the latest scams sent with an invalid return address.

Here is my solution: communication tollbooths. Charge everyone for taking up each other's time. "Time is money" according to the proverb, so why should we have to give ours away for free? I would be okay with people wasting my time as long as they paid me for it.

Anyone who calls me on the phone should have to pay a dollar per minute. I could make five bucks just listening to the sales pitches of a phone company trying to get me to switch long-distance service. Spouses could stay home all day and make sixty dollars an hour doing what they like to do anyway: talking on the phone!

Note: I get to press the "#" key which means "refund" so that my friends or business colleagues do not get charged. They are not wasting my time, so they don't have to pay. But wrong numbers and prank callers? Ring 'em up! Ch-ching baby! $$$ You had better be sure of your target before you dial my number.

Every email should only hit my mailbox after depositing a quarter into my Paypal account. That way the thirty or so unwelcome solicitation mails per day will start to pay off my eBay purchases. Any advertisers should have to bet that their titles will be interesting enough to get me to read their product ads. Then no one would worry about their email address getting "farmed" onto those accursed mailing lists.

The good part is, any welcome mailings will receive an automatic refund when I email them back. They'll get a quarter from me, the same as they just spent to reach me. People will start writing you better than two-sentence emails too, since they'll want to get their money's worth. Plus, if you start to dislike a friend, stop giving them refunds by mailing back. They'll get the picture as their Paypal account dries up.

Communication tollbooths! You could have been earning money just by reading this article. :-)

Deft of wit but daft of wits, John Ashen is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ which is a site for Creative Writing.