I have a phone at work. I couldn’t tell you my extension, nor the company’s main number. Several of the people with desks near me have been with the company for years, and none of them know the number or their extension, either.

Starting yesterday, though, some recruiting company beat me to figuring out my own phone number, and has been calling me repeatedly trying to place candidates with me. They don’t seem to care at all that we’re not a .NET shop, not hiring*, that even if we were, calling my department wouldn’t make any sense, or that I wouldn’t be involved in the hiring process at all even if the Systems department decided to hire programmers.

The first time I was trying to help the caller, thinking it was maybe an important call or something. Only when I realized the call was going nowhere did I start to get annoyed. And then he asked if I would mind if he put me on hold. Before I could say that I did, in fact, mind, I was on hold. So I hung up, and then discovered from my coworkers that recruiters rank somewhere in between spammers and rapists on the totem pole.

So I got another call this morning, and today I was a little more curt. After reiterating—repeatedly—that I have nothing to do with the hiring process, and that we weren’t even hiring for the position she was talking about, I said something like “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the time to talk about this any further.”

“Oh, did I catch you in the middle of a fire or something?”

I confused her by replying, “Pretty much, yeah.”

But before I could hang up, and with her apparently convinced that I was in a burning building, she asked, “Well, before you go, do you think that, if you were hiring, the candidate I described is someone you would hire?”

Yes. If my office were ever on fire, and the company had decided to put me, their junior systems administrator, in charge of hiring a senior Ruby (on Linux) developer, even though we’re not looking for one*, I would definitely hire the .NET developer you’re pitching.

* Actually, we probably are. But we’re not telling the recruiters this, because then they’d call even more.