The phone calls started randomly one by - one or two a day. They weren't that bothersome. The phone would ring, I would answer - nothing..

When you teach and you sometimes receive phone calls like that, you usually think it's perhaps a disgruntled student, annoyed that he or she received a bad grade for something incidental like never showing up for class, or skipping tests, or forging documents from the dean's office. So, it made me a little worried, but not much. I forgot about it within a few hours.

Then, I was home for an entire Wednesday, trying to write my radio program for the blind on Crime and the Law and get my classes ready for the next day. I got two of these hang up telephone calls between 9 and 10 AM. After the second one, I called #57, the number you're told to dial if you need to trace a call. What I received was a recorded message saying that the previous number could not be traced.

"Well," I said to my cat Fernando, who usually supervises my work, "that did a lot of good."

By 11:00, I received another call and by 4:00 PM I had received a call almost every hour on the hour. It was definitely time to do something. I looked in the directory to find the number where you report telephone harassment.

"Do you hear any background noise?" The woman on the other end of the phone asked?

"No." I replied. "Never."

"It's just like a dead line?"

"Yeah."

"And then it hangs up."

"Yep."

"It's a telemarketer." She said wearily.

This very helpful woman went on to explain to me some of the mysteries of the telemarketing age. Evidently, these calls are very common. She estimated that out of every 20 complaints she received reporting harassing phone calls, 19 were found to be from telemarketers rather than sexual perverts, or ex-spouses.

She said there was a company working the Tallahassee area and that the office had received a lot of calls complaining in the past week.

The deal is this. These companies hire, say, 15 people to sit in a room with cubicles and telephones in front of them. A computer dials say 25 numbers every five minutes, and if a connection is made, and one of these 15 people is available to talk to you, he or she does. But, if all of these career challenged 15 people are busy talking to other people, you simply get a dead line. This is, evidently, quite legal.

"But what do I do?" I asked her. "I can't concentrate if I'm interrupted every hour on the hour." Well, first she played around on her computer and found out that the call was long distance, not surprising since most of these telemarketers are from out of state. Then she tried to have ATT trace the call. They couldn't. They couldn't - trace - a call - that had come over their own lines.

As my father said when I later told him about the incident: "If the blankedy blank telephone company can't trace the call, who can?" "Well, precisely." I responded.

So, there I was left with absolutely nothing to do about my phone ringing 8 times a day with no one on the other end. It made me more than a little angry.

What about elderly and handicapped people, I thought, who would have to struggle six or eight times a day to answer a dead telephone. What about people who worked during the night and tried to sleep during the day? It ought to be illegal, but like so many things that make the lives of ordinary people miserable, it isn't, because it makes money. By one estimate telemarketing is a $500 billion business.

As Molly Ivins says: "Big business wins again."