IN PLACE OF THE PARTY LINE OPERATOR. Tom Maguire, pinch-hitting for Instapundit, discovers a service that could go over to either side of the Force.

Finally have just one number that reaches you everywhere: you decide where you want to pick up your calls. Save on your wireless minutes if youre [c.q.] at home or work and never miss a call, even if you move or change jobs.

Bleah.

David Pogue at the New York Times introduces the service this way.

If you have only one telephone with one phone number, this column won’t be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric you.

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

Sometimes it's nice to be rich enough NOT to have to be on call all the time, although I suspect there are more than a few Really Useful People who could put a stop to this on-call-all-the-time-everywhere nonsense simply by refusing to participate, either as receiver of calls or as placer of calls.

There is one feature of the new service that intrigues.

GrandCentral maintains a database of telemarketer numbers that is constantly updated by reports from its own subscribers. Your phones don’t even ring when a telemarketer in that database tries to reach you.

Such developments have the potential to take the profit out of telemarketing. There is, however, an eccentric way to deal with the problem: simply do not take any calls at meal time. Yes, that goes for families with kids too.