Vintage telephone, modern exchange
Erin Fogarty : Auckland NZ : 1960s
Dial M for memories I started life in a time when phone calls were made with the assistance of a telephone exchange operator. Lift the Bakelite phone handset and a polite voice would ask: "Number, please?" Tell the operator the phone number you required — usually no more than four digits — and, by some sort of magic, you were connected to the person you wished to speak to.
"Mummy will be home at 4 o'clock". Sometimes the ladies at the telephone exchange did more than just connect you to another phone.
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This system had advantages and pitfalls. One pitfall was the Party Line. A Party Line meant you shared your telephone number with other households in your neighbourhood. Each party had the same phone number suffixed with a unique letter. Your phone's ringing sound depended on your letter and you ignored all rings apart from your own. Ours optimistically played Jingle Bells. To me, it was Christmas every day. We often grizzled about the others in our party, especially the old couple up the road who would deliberately leave their phone off the hook. One party's phone off the hook meant no calls for anyone. In retrospect I cannot begin to imagine what it was like having our family as a member of one's party. We numbered 10 and nine of us liked the phone very much! If you were on a call and someone from another party picked up their handset, you broke off communication to firmly say: "Working," which meant you were using the phone. As a youngster I found this puzzling. Clearly, you weren't working, you were gossiping on the phone. The advantage of the Party Line was the sense of community and often one knew the telephone exchange operators by name. If my mother was to be unexpectedly out when we returned from our day at school, she would simply tell the telephone exchange operator. Upon arriving home to an empty house we could pick up the phone and the operator would say something quaint like: "Mummy's running late and she will be home before 4 o'clock. Once you have changed out of your school uniform, you may have two ginger biscuits and a glass of cordial. Tell child number six it is her turn to peel the vegetables. Please peel 32 potatoes, three kumara, six carrots. Mummy will do the onions when she gets home. Don't set fire to the budgie and if Mummy arrives home to find your youngest sister tied to the vacuum cleaner and dumped on the front lawn, there will be no pudding," ... or instructions to that effect.
The Bakelite phone with the plaited cord. Heavy but with a ring that sounded like Christmas.
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Bakelite phones were duly replaced with plastic ones which still had a rotary dial. My father — who actually never used the telephone — hated the plastic ones. He said they were too light and flew about the desk when you tried to dial a number. So we stayed with the black Bakelite model that weighed a ton and had a plaited cord attaching the handset to the phone base rather than the stretchy coil I envied on the neighbour's phone. Years passed and there were further advances in technology. We got our own phone number with five unique digits which marked the end of the shared party line. There was no stopping the progress as soon the nation was to embrace the arrival of the push-button phone. The entire nation that was, except for us. My father wondered if there would be no end to the evil of the telephone companies. He rejected all attempts by Post & Telegraph to install one of these smaller, lighter and even-more-plastic phones in his house. Worse, the new phones didn't so much "ring" as "chirrup". He'd never hear it, he said, though he was still yet to be seen actually responding to any telephone's ring. More time went by and more futile attempts were made by P&T to upgrade our phone. My parents were on holiday the day two burly chaps knocked on the door brandishing a shiny new push-button phone (plastic, beige). They were all "pulse dialing this and analogue that" and despite our protests, they assured us they would be replacing our Bakelite phone.
NZPO Type 200: Supremely simple in beige, it would be years before one of these instruments darkened our doorstep.
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It transpired the local exchange had been modernised some years previously yet despite the modernisation there had occurred a persistent fault. Various technicians had been employed and subsequently baffled until it was finally revealed that the fault was with the old Bakelite telephone connected in our house. The options were to have a new push-button phone installed or no telephone at all. The men were here to disconnect the old phone and nothing would make them leave the house until they had done so. Whether we accepted the new phone with its plug-in jack was entirely up to us. We were relieved our parents were on holiday. Had our father been in the house we would have finished up with no telephone at all. With the new installation completed, we begged the men to leave the old phone with us and we made a sort of shrine for it on my parents' bed. We said a quick prayer ("Please, God, make father let us keep the push-button phone") and hastily set about ringing all of our friends on our new phone-with-push-buttons-and-ergonomically-designed handset. Today father has purchased just his second phone since the installation of the evil plastic push-button one. This new phone is very light (strangely, in his mind lightness is now a design feature), comes complete with answerphone, storage space for a zillion numbers and the ability to perform in every room of the house, and outside in the garden. The Bakelite model gathered dust for some years under the house alongside the Morse Code machine (I'm not joking) before finding its way to a landfill. Pity, I could have sold it on eBay.
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Boxing
