Who Can It Be Calling on My Work Phone?

    My work phone has been very busy these past few weeks.  Over a dozen calls a day sometimes.  Unfortunately, the majority of these calls are not work-related, but telemarketers.  Predominately about Medicaid, or Medicare.  I get the two confused.  Sometimes, the telemarketers mention both.  There's also life expenses, funeral costs and such.  The problem actually started this past spring.  The store started to get phone calls for a 'Rhonda,' or possibly 'Wanda.' It can be hard to tell through some of the thick accents of the live callers.  From at least one call, this woman is from New Jersey. I always found it strange that the area code would be messed up that badly.  Anyway, those phone call started to drop off, only to be replaced these last few weeks by an onslaught of of Medicare callers.  Many of them automatic calls that pretend to be live.  Whenever the store gets one of these calls, I have fun with it.  I answer "Hello" with the same unusual tone the caller has.  When they ask how I feel, I try to respond in an unusual way.  Frequently, I just go "Meh."  A few times I go with "Horrible." How else would I feel when being bombarded with these annoying calls.  These fake callers sometimes respond with an appropriate answer, such as "So bad." Sometimes with the wrong response, such as "That's great!"  Even when I respond with a negative, they ignore the answer and continue on with the call, sending me over to a 'live' person.  I usually hang up by then, before I find out. [I just had one such call right now.  It was a real person.  When I said I felt "horrible," they asked why.  I said it was due to being called so many times and asked not to be called again.  They hung up before I finished my sentence.] I can't figure out why my store is getting so many of these types of calls.  It doesn't make sense for this to happen to a business. The store is getting calls about accident claims, Social Security benefits, life insurance. It just doesn't make sense.  It doesn't help that someone else at the store liked to wait until the second or third ring to pick up the receiver, just so the Caller ID feature would catch the number.  They would especially like to see who called overnight or the weekends.  Many times, the number was a spoof.  Obviously a hospital wouldn't be calling a business legitimately during off-hours. It happened so much that the back-up batteries in the landline have been acting up.  I'm not sure if they are dead or the connection has failed again.  Once, I left dead batteries in there a little too long, and one of the connectors corroded when a battery started to leak.  Currently, most of the phone's features only work during an active call, which is not long enough to do anything worthwhile beyond actual calling.  I got so bad, that the other person in the store decided to put the store's number on the national do-not-call registry, against my better wishes.  I'm afraid that could limit the number and times of legitimate callers.  Sure, we could do without so many third-party dealers wanting to help verify the store's Google listing, but I'm not sure we could do without so many other 'real' callers, besides potential customers. So far, the telemarketers still are calling.