My sister was dating a guy with a big dog that he was nuts about. The guy went on a business trip and asked sis to dogsit. She was nervous, as it was a big dog and not crazy about her. Two days later, she called me in tears, saying the dog had injured its leg and was limping pathetically – what should she do? I told her, call the guy and see what vet to take it to. She called him and he laughed his head off – apparently the dog pulls this trick every time he leaves to get more attention. It limped until the guy came home and then was miraculously healed!
The bird(s) in question:
I forgot one… a neighbor of mine when I was a kid had a parrot of some sort. You’d hear the parrot screeching “Mom! MOM! MOM!!!” followed by a quieter “Just a minute!” Wonder what that bird heard all day? 
Zahzoo, my grey parrot used to fake sneeze to make my husband pay attention to him. The bird “sneezed!” for an hour straight and nearly got a trip to the veterinarian, but I was able to talk my husband out of it by explaining it was a fake sneeze. To this day, the bird makes that noise when my husband enters the room. Then it laughs.
When I was a kid, we had a budgie who would call out “Hey Mama!” which was our way of attracting our mother’s attention. The budgie never gave Mama’s response, though.
Lotsa cute stories about what things parrots and parakeets will imitate.
Here’s a theory: It is suggested that parrots and similar birds use imitation as a social attention-getting device. If they see someone else (in a parrot’s real life, that’s usually another bird) getting the attention, they will imitate whatever that one is doing to get the attention. In a captive setting, they will imitate other people, cats, squeaky hinges, whatever. If it makes noise and gets attention, that’s what they imitate to get the attention for themselves.
Thus, if you want to teach your bird to talk, you don’t do that by talking to the bird. Instead, you get another person, and have one person speak to the other person, and the listening person should visibly pay attention to the speaker. Then the bird will imitate the speaker, to get the attention of the other person. Of course, then they repeat whatever they learned to get attention from anyone.
I learned all this from a talk I attended some years ago, by Irene Pepperberg, of Alex the African Grey Parrot fame. (See also Wikipedia article.
From Wiki article about Alex:
This, a good 80% of our African Grey’s repetoir is reproducing the various body sounds we make.
Unfortunately.
My boyfriend’s dog does the same sneezing thing. Doesn’t matter who starts it up – once it gets going, human and dog have long back-and-forth exchanges going “Chooff!” at each other. It’s aww-inducing until the dog gets agitated and starts barking. (He’s a schnauzer mix; his barks are lightning through the skull.)
A childhood friend had an african grey (or her parents did) which would loudly tell you to ‘Turn that rubbish off’ every time it heard a soap opera theme…
My friend Dar had a parrot named Cisco. Every time she would go into the bathroom, the dang parrot would imitate the phone ringing, then the answering machine picking up. He would then perfectly mimic her husband’s voice, as if leaving a message. “Hi honey, this is Hans. I am just calling you to say hi. I am at lunch. See you this evening, love you, goodbye.” Click
She would go racing out of the bathroom and Cisco would be standing on his perch, laughing his fool head off…
LOL! Great stories!