Don’t call us; we’ll call you.

In fact, don’t ever use our telephone for your use. It’s ours. It’s in our home. We pay for it, not you.

This message goes to all solicitors, all telemarketers who interrupt our meals and naps without an invitation to use our phone service, and particularly to pesky political candidates who dial our number with their recorded messages. Is there no end to this intrusion?

On June 10, seven unwelcome calls were relayed over our private phone lines by candidates or by their campaign workers. Worse, most of those pre-vote calls were prerecorded. Shame, shame – not even a live voice on the other end of the line.

Yet on the same day came our Verizon bill, addressed to us, not to those who use our phone without permission.

First, there’s the fee for standard local service, $17. In Maine, local calls are those to folks across town, within earshot of the fire whistle, which presently is broken and defunct. Calls to neighbors up the road apiece are “toll calls,” long-distance costs added to customer bills. To Verizon, 15 or 20 miles is a long distance no matter how the crow flies.

Add the surcharges and taxes: $5 for FCC line charge, 23 cents for local number portability, 8 cents for school and library fund, $1.14 for state tax, 50 cents for Enhanced-911 surcharge, 60 cents for federal USF surcharge and 68 cents for federal tax.

We’re not sure what “number portability” is, but if it includes allowing telemarketers and other strangers to tote around our phone service, we say no. And what’s the charge for school and library fund, which our town meeting last week just appropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain? Who gets this extra 8 cents?

As for the half-dollar for Enhanced- 911, this part of the woods doesn’t even have a working emergency number, let alone the “enhanced” version. If and when it gets around here, 911 probably will be considered a “toll call.”

For the basics, we’re paying at least $25.23 a month for phone service. Ours, not yours, or Maine Public Broadcasting, or MCI-Delta free miles offerings, or university alumni pledges, or political messages or telephone surveys.

Sure, we could pay an additional fee for the subscription service, Caller ID, which would identify those strangers making unsolicited calls to our home. But it wouldn’t stop them.

We want them stopped. Over and out.