Telling them to go away is a pointless exercise.

Once a door-to-door salesman has you in his sights, he does not give up without a fight.

I recently left numerous messages for a representative from a cable company who left a card arranging to call one evening. "Please tell him it's not convenient," I told his colleagues, knowing that he would call anyway. And he did.

But to give him his due, he was not pushy, and accepted that we would get in touch when the time was right.

And the previous week, a representative from our electricity supplier was most understanding of my thousand and one reasons not to buy any other product (in this case gas) from them.

Not that we've always escaped from reps unscathed. Our mortgage company sent someone around at my request, after I asked for reassurance following scares over endowment policies in the papers.

He spent four seconds telling us not to worry, and the best part of four hours trying to sell us every insurance policy under the sun.

He really brightened up our evening, stressing that we could easily die the next day, leaving our child a penniless orphan. He was so insistent, I worried he might sneak back under cover of darkness and tamper with the brakes on my car - just to prove a point.

The man was quite intimidating and became stroppy when - despite our huge protestations - it finally dawned upon him that nothing short of ten years' free car insurance, with a new car and Caribbean holiday thrown in, would result in a signature on the dotted lines he kept wafting about. I almost had to throw him out.

Last week a householder who had been inundated with calls about double glazing snapped in anger, blocked the sales rep's car in his drive, and forced him to endure a tour of his 16th century house, while he lectured him as to why he did not want plastic windows. He then made him promise never to call again.

Perhaps I should have locked our pushy insurance salesman in the under-stairs cupboard until his intense sales patter petered out, and he began to resemble a human being again. Problem is, he was so committed to clinching a sale that he'd still be there now.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic - I know many reps work on commission only, and must get results or they don't get paid. But, as the recent clampdown on heavy-handed public utility salesmen demonstrated, it's also a lot to do with personality. A salesman described as "talented and aggressive" was recently awarded £320,000 damages after a road accident left him with a much nicer personality - and unable to do his job.

He lost his aggressiveness and, said his family and friends, became much more pleasant.

Journalists are universally unpopular for supposedly being hard and uncaring. The next time I bang my head I may put in a claim, getting friends and family to stand up in court and say what a kind, caring, thoroughly nice person I am - not at all suitable for a job at the T&A!

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.