Article content continued

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

And then there are the ducks. “Sorry, could you just hang on for one second here, hang on,” says Lenny to a chorus of quacks in the background.

Lenny, as you’ll have gathered by now, though poor, patient Segalle apparently never did, is a recording — a series of pitch-perfect responses designed to fool callers into thinking they’ve reached a genuine person with genuine interest in whatever they’re pitching.

“The dishonest telemarketers are the ones that Lenny is really intended for,” explains “Mango,” an Alberta software designer and big Lenny fan.

These are the callers who spoof their caller-ID numbers and otherwise flout do-not-call-registry rules to try to scam you with offers of cheap duct cleaning or super-low-credit interest rates.

“Political telemarketers tend to follow the law,” adds Mango, who didn’t want his real name used. “But if they bother people who don’t want to be bothered, the other Lenny users and I see no moral reason why they should not talk to Lenny.”

But who is the real Lenny? Bit of a mystery, that (as Lenny might muse).

According to Internet chatter he’s an actor in Brisbane, Australia — though clearly of English origin — who made his recordings for an company that wanted to respond in kind to time-wasting callers. About 2013, however, the original Lenny stopped working, so Mango and other tech-types decided to recreate him based on the published recordings.

Mango’s version — “written with just 15 lines of computer code,” he boasts — has 16 “prompts” before returning to the start. An example from early in the sequence: “Someone did say last week, or call last week, about the same thing. Was that … you?”