Here's the situation: you're running a small business from your home, selling homemade, hand painted plaster moulds of the greatest heroes from the Spanish-American war. But there's a problem. None of the people you call to sell these great products to will take you seriously! There can only be one reason. It has nothing to do with the confusing and uninteresting garbage that you're selling; instead it's got to be the fact that they can tell that you're working from home, and not some fancy-shmancy big-time office building. In the past this type of problem was insurmountable, but not anymore. Now you can zip on over to the Thriving Office website, and for a mere $5.95 you can download one of two mp3 files that play all the noises that a real office has, so whoever you're talking to on the phone will think you're a real life cubicle monster, even though you're sitting in your living room in your jammies! Success!

It's actually a fairly simple and smart idea, and could be useful. It plays sounds of ringing phones and the like, and comes in two different intensities. Busy, and of course, Very Busy. The website claims that several big name companies that supposedly use -- or at least have purchased -- the product, as well as some pretty nice quotes from some reliable sources. The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and USA Today all had favorable reviews. They link to 14 different positive articles, which leads one to wonder why they felt the need to link to the one German source which states, according to some cheap internet translator, "Thriving Office supplies already times the hell noise, which the small verschüchterte I AG yet does not bring." You said it, FTD.de.