Phones

 First published in Column 8, 19^th June, 1991

One of my readers tells me I forgot to mention personal stereos in the ‘music, music everywhere and not a note to sing’ article.

The difference between the muzak that follows us everywhere we go and a personal stereo wrapped around our ears is that with the latter we can choose what we listen to. (At least I assume we still can. Hopefully our legislators – under urgency with only five members in the House – haven’t passed a law while I was asleep stating that you must listen to parliamentary broadcasts on your personal stereo.)

Here's some good news. I’ve just come across a report of a marketing breakthrough in the States.

It seems that in the land of the brave and free, when you telephone the number you want, you may have to wait to be answered not just for several seconds, but for several minutes. (And Telecom brought Americans in on our little phone system. Oh, boy!)

No longer, however, will you have to listen to telephone muzak. You’ll be able to listen to…wait for it: advertising! First there’ll  be a minute’s worth of the latest music tape, then a little intro by the announcer, and off into the next track. Naturally it’ll be of their choice.

Well, it can’t be much worse than the new phone systems that are proliferating in Dunedin.

We had to have them, of course, being new technology. We couldn’t learn anything from the misery on other phone customers’ faces around the world.

The new system – and I won’t mention the ailing health board or the government department that says it’s their job to be fair where you’ll strike this horrendous device – works as follows.

A recorded voice answers by welcoming you. It then proceeds to inform you that if you have a push-button phone you can press number one and the operator will answer. If you know the extension you want, you can press the required numbers. This won’t immediately get you your extension. A woman’s voice will arise and ask you to wait a moment. Finally the extension phone will start to ring.

That’s what happens when things are working properly. At another place where this system has been installed, the following sequence of events happened to me over and over again. A recorded voice said: This is so and so. If you require the operator, press One. If you know the number…

Well, at that point I pressed one. The voice told me: You have pressed an invalid number, please wait for the operator to answer.

I waited, but the operator, it seems, didn’t know of my existence, because the next thing I knew the recorded voice returned and told me to press One for the operator. Two seconds later, I was informed that I had pressed an invalid number. And so on, until I was ready to dash the receiver into its place with enough force to send it through the wall.

And Gordon McLauchlin races all over America and breathlessly tells us communications are improving.

Phones are such fun! However, there is another side to all this. Sometimes it isn’t just the customer who gets a little tetchy.

I used to work in the International Telephone Exchange in London. Dozens of segregated operators – men at night, women in the daytime – trying their hardest to answer hundreds of calls an hour.

On one overloaded Sunday afternoon (men worked the weekends as well) my neighbour told me listen in on his line: an irate caller was abusing him at length for not having answered his call an hour ago.

Since my neighbour hadn’t stopped answering calls since he came on his shift this was hardly his fault.

Unfortunately the operator’s attempts to explain the delay and apologise fell on deaf ears: the bumptious male caller continued his abuse.

A fatal mistake. In the next second my workmate said a couple of non-Post Office words and the caller’s connection was unplugged. Once more he took his place at the end of the hour-long queue. My workmate sighed a little sigh of regret at losing such a friendly customer.

International Telephone Exchange - though note
the man in amongst the ladies; not in my day!
Photo courtesy of Science Museum