Simpler times before small screens
Can you remember when telephones were fixed to the wall, most often in your home’s hallway? They had one job – to carry voice over distance. There was no texting, FaceTiming, email sending, GPS mapping, internet searching, photographing or, Lord save us, attempting to work with Siri’s borderline passiveaggressive version of assistance. Despite the label ‘‘cellphone’’, in reality most of us now make calls from a small but powerful computer.
Before the brave new world of communication technology we suffer or enjoy today, depending on your point of view, things were a lot simpler.
Were those times better? They were certainly a world away from the present state of telephonic communication.
For instance, consider the party line. If the NZ Post Office, the government department that operated the telephone system before 1987 was short of physical capacity, phone lines were shared with your neighbours.
We bought our first home in Stoke’s Marsden Rd in 1978 and, as new Stoke residents, a shared telephone line was the only option. If the line was busy, we had to wait. It was many months before we had a private line. Housing development between the eastern ends of Main and Nayland roads in Stoke was booming, and the post office’s lines division was struggling to keep up.
In rural areas like the French Pass district, party lines were standard. Calls were made through a switchboard operator in Rai Valley. You lifted the receiver, enquired, ‘‘Working?’’ to check that the line was clear, wound the handle for about three seconds for one ‘‘long’’ ring, and waited for the operator to answer. You told him or her the number you wanted, and were connected, as long as that line wasn’t busy.
You knew someone was phoning you because the ring you heard represented your designated Morse code letter. Our D’Urville Island phone number ended in ‘‘S’’, three short rings.
Party lines could cause inconvenience.
In the 1970s, D’Urville was serviced by a number of shared lines. A legal dispute involving the coowners of one isolated property prompted one to drive for more than three hours (return) to consult his lawyers on our phone line, so his business partner couldn’t listen in.
My parents would roll their eyes at each other whenever he appeared at the gate, and banished us to the living room to give the beleaguered chap some privacy. I can picture him now, perched uncomfortably on our chilly back porch under a single dim bulb, vehement fragments of his side of a tense dialogue uncomfortably audible.
On a party line, you heard all the calls ring through the shared system.
Husband Steve remembers being woken every morning at 4am on his first visit to my family’s home in 1973. This city boy wondered who on earth would be using the phone so regularly at that early hour. And why didn’t anyone get up and answer?
We explained party line technology to him, and also the surprising information that we knew exactly what the 4am call was about. It was topdressing season, and the topdressing company in Woodbourne, Blenheim was calling one of the big sheep farms at the northern tip of the island to inquire about weather conditions for the day’s DC3 fertiliser drops.
But there was a plus side to this relatively primitive technology that, I suggest, comes under the general category of community service. Switchboard operators often used their initiative to do more than merely connect calls.
During all my childhood and teenage years, one of the Rai Valley switchboard operators was Bluey Burson, a wartime buddy of my father’s. He’d come home to the Rai to raise a family, work his small farm down the valley towards Pelorus Bridge, and operate the switchboard at the Rai Valley Post Office.
At that time the mail delivery to French Pass was twice weekly, and in late January, French Pass teenagers, anxious for their exam results, could ring the exchange when Bluey was on duty. He would walk through from his switchboard to the mailroom, extract the results notice from the pigeonholes of sorted mail, open the envelope and read it out over the phone to the anxious candidate.
This is how I received my School Certificate results in 1970. My three passes (two B-pluses and an A) and three fails (all C-minus) were treated sympathetically by Bluey, who added congratulations and a bit of what we’d now call ‘‘counselling’’ to the call.
Present-day telco service centres could learn a thing or two from the likes of Bluey Burson.
Switchboard operators often used their initiative to do more than merely connect calls.