[crikli]

You're not acknowledging some of the political realities of the work place that make such silliness necessary.

At my last job the IT guy, who had at some point been frightened by soap and had since managed to evade it in every form, would come and stand in front of my desk for as long as it took for me to acknowledge him. He could not be out-waited.

Thing is, he got his feeling tremendously hurt if you told him you didn't have time to talk to him, you were busy, etc. And next time you needed a server provisioned or something you were in for a long wait.

So my officemate and I wrote a very similar tool to the OPs that would place a call to our desk phones so that we could get out of these situations.

Silly? Absolutely. But 100% necessary given the personalities involved.