Man uses his flute to stop cold-callers

11 September 2018, 13:02 | Updated: 6 May 2021, 17:43

A flautist has been using his instrument as an aural weapon against cold-callers who won’t stop ringing his house phone.

Flautist Evert Fruitman, who died last year on 5 November after a long and successful career teaching at Arizona State University, had a rather pleasing method for getting rid of cold-callers.

Despite being on the ‘do not call’ list in Sun City, Arizona, cold-callers wouldn’t stop phoning Evert.

“I don’t like them because I don’t trust them,” he told Joe Ducey on ABC15 Arizona.

“Number one, they’re not supposed to call, they’re breaking the law. So that means I can believe anything and everything they tell me? I don’t think so!”

His solution, he tells Ducey, was to interrupt the caller by incessantly playing ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on his flute, until they eventually hung up the phone.

Man uses flute to stop phone telemarketers

And if his fluting didn’t work, Evert would press the star key on his phone over and over, creating an irritating beeping noise for the cold-caller.

“Why didn’t you just hang up?”, the interviewer asks him in the video.

He replies: “Well, first I have to answer the phone to see who it is.”