Among the collection of 10 No-No's that Moses carted down from Mount Sinai was one about doing terminal damage to other people. But Moses never got a phone call at 10:36 p.m. from some dolt trying to sell him double-glazing.

Nor did the good prophet, midway through calling up the Plague of the Day or parting the Red Sea, get interrupted by telephonic news that he had just been selected as recipient of a brand new fitted kitchen, provided he let his fellow Hebrews drop by for a look-see.

Otherwise, it's very likely we would be worried about keeping the Nine Commandments.

The plagues of locusts, frogs and flies that Pharaoh and his pals had to endure have their counterpart today in the swarms of telephone "cold callers" who get on the blower, usually about three prawns into your cocktail, to try to sell you things you clearly do not want or need with promises that they are free when clearly they are not.

Now, in Britain, the telephone company is riding like some sort of technological white knight to rescue us from the window salesmen, spurned lovers and heavy breathers whose use of their product does to our quality of life about what a fly with the green apple quickstep does to banana cream pie.

What British Telecom has come up with is a service that instantly cuts off telephone pests. It is officially known as The Last Incoming Call Bar, a "guaranteed good-bye" that immediately prevents the caller from calling back.

What happens is that by the time the nuisance is getting around to telling you how his crew just happened to be in your neighborhood and was ready to get straight to work on that new kitchen, you simply key in a numbered code on your phone.

The result is that when they call back - and as we all know, they always do - they hear a recorded message saying, "The person you have dialed no longer wishes to speak to you."

And if you decide, after finishing watching in peace how Mulder gets Scully out of her latest coma on the X-Files, that you do, after all, wish to hear Aunt Matilda's report on son Jasper's latest conviction for doing naughty things with toothpaste, you can tap in a second code that gives the phone pest renewed access.

It seems a more sure-fire solution than my own tried and only partly proved comment to the caller that "I do not accept unsolicited calls," before slamming the thing back on the hook, or just laying the receiver down to let the dog's derriere rabbit on while I go back to important business, like picking lint off a tennis ball.

And yet, and yet ...There is ever a nagging suspicion about progress, particularly when it involves the phone company. Make something foolproof, and someone makes a better fool.

Meanwhile, science is beginning to make life with the telephone a bit more bearable, although it has a far piece to go to recompense the human race for having invented the thing in the first place.

And it has yet to confront other problems of considerable magnitude. Consider the impotent rage inspired in most of us by being placed on involuntary "hold" on the phone and having to listen to several thousand bars of synthesized music while the company you are calling is on strike, burning down or going into liquidation.

This musical interlude has made "Greensleeves" the most hated melody on six planets, with the possible exception of "The Shoop Shoop Song" and "Achey Breakey Heart."

Nor have the scientific researchers done much to relieve us of that other great modern plague, the mobile phone - or, rather, the idiots to whose ear the thing is rooted. Such as the businessman who, as an entire train carload of passengers listened, phoned his wife to say he was working late, then called his mistress to say, "I've gotten us an hour or so."

Jim Allaway, who commutes to London from the south coast city of Portsmouth, predicts "there will soon be a serial killer of mobile phone users on the Portsmouth-Waterloo line. I'll go quietly - provided I'm put in solitary."

I'll join you, Jim. And I promise ever afterward to obey the Nine Commandments.

Thought for the Week: If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is not for you.

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