Bank's telemarketers won't leave some off the hook.

Byline: Sid McKeen

COLUMN: WRY AND GINGER

Like the line from that great old Frank Sinatra favorite "My Way," I've had a few regrets in life myself. Three in particular:

(1) I never had a treehouse as a kid,

(2) I never sent a message in a bottle, and

(3) I've never owned a motorcycle.

I've long since given up on the treehouse and the bike, but it may not be too late to get off the message in the bottle. In this case, the bottle will be this column and the message will be "Cease. Desist. Enough already." Unlike the old message-in-a-bottle shtick, in which the identity of the eventual recipient is unknown to the sender, I know precisely the party to whom this one is addressed - Bank of America.

That august institution has been stalking me for at least the last three months in two different states, even though I am a duly listed member of the Federal Trade Commission's National Do-Not-Call Registry.

The catch there is that companies with whom you have done business in the past are still free to turn their telemarketers loose on you, and B of A recently bought a company that issued a credit card I haven't used in more than a year.

Whatever it is, they're trying to tell me or sell me I've forgotten, but the unwanted calls started last spring when we were still in Florida and have continued off and on largely unabated since we returned to Maine, despite my flat insistence of disinterest and pleas that they be halted.

The voices of the callers indicate that there's a small army of these solicitors. Some are women, some are men. Some sound older, some younger. Some have strong regional accents, some don't. But the opening doesn't vary. The caller gives his or her name and the name of the bank, then launches into a string of chatter that I quickly point out I don't care to hear.

One of the rules set up by the FTC requires that marketers refrain from calling before 9 a.m. My most recent one came in at precisely 9:01, according to my bedside clock.

OK, most people are up and out by that hour, I admit, but I've been known to remain beneath the covers sometimes for an hour beyond that, especially when the Red Sox are playing night games on the West Coast.

When the caller identified himself as an agent of Bank of America, I woke in an instant and barked into the phone, "Hey, I'm sick and tired of these calls. Just take me off your list!" He apologized for "the inconvenience" and assured me that in a matter of days, I would no longer get called.

We'll see. If that doesn't work, I'll dig up a bottle, fill it with a notarized cease-and-desist order and dispatch it by priority mail to the office of the president.

Either that or I'll buy a Harley, zoom over to The Home Depot for some lumber and build myself a treehouse. One that doesn't have a phone.

Sid McKeen can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].