Ever find yourself in an awkward situation where you were desperately looking for an excuse to leave?  Do you want to make people think you are important?  Want to waste some anytime minutes?  You might want to check out The Popularity Dialer.

With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead.  Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times).  At the elcted time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that's one half of a conversation.  Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

Why didn't I know about this sooner?

Update: Two of us have tried The Popularity Dialer now and have come up with lame results -- We didn't receive any phone calls!  (Does that make us extrememly unpopular when we don't even receive phone calls from automated services?) 

If anybody has gotten this service to work let us know in the comments.

[via delicious]