I was in a bric-a-brac shop with herself and there was an old bakelite phone which she rather liked. The nice lady behind the counter said, “I have one plugged in here, do you want to try ringing your mother’s mobile?” We laughed as she poked at the cumbersome dial in amazement. Of course, she went wrong half way through and had to start again. “Push down the buttons where the receiver goes until you get a dial tone” we said. She looked at us in disbelief – really how primitive was this system? Wait until I tell her you had to wait three months to get a phone when I was a child. And that you rang the operator and gave the name of the town and asked for a number, in the case of our country cousins, this was 42. It turns out that 35 years is quite a long time.
You can still buy phones with dials as toys and my children had one (recently passed on to a baby cousin); I’ve wondered sometimes if they ever connected it with the phones that we use.
I can remember a time before my parents got a telephone in the house, when my mother would walk down the road to the call box every week to ring my grandmother. That would have been in the early 1980s. I was telling the boys about it and trying to explain call boxes. They still exist, of course, but my children had never noticed them.
3 months only? I think it was more like 3 years in some areas…I have a vague memory of a lengthy post office strike while we were still waiting for a phone, during which communications with the outside world were pretty much impossible. Unimaginable to the facebook generation. We are getting very old indeed.
When I last had a new phone line fitted it took several months. It was told it was because Belgacom, which owns the lines (or something like that), was being uncooperative with the other providers on the market, including mine. I have similar problems whenever there’s a fault on my line: Belgacom won’t come out till my provider has been out three times, even if only Belgacom can resolve the problem – or at least that’s what we’re told. (Sorry, very trivial post but I thought you’d enjoy the slice of life from your old country of residence.)
My grandfather was the postmaster, so the manual exchange was in our house up to about 1980. It looked roughly like this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/re_teacher/15960375/
and the operator had a dirty-yellow-white headset with a sort of speaking trumpet mouthpiece which I think itself was Bakelite. My cousins and I used to tiptoe out to watch them at their arcane rites, which included chanting the name of the exchange over and over until the superior exchange answered.
The toy phones I see most are of a model which wasn’t seen much in reality in Ireland at all, with an old fashioned shape and handle but push buttons instead of a dial.
Dot, I can’t imagine that they do – I mean, would you? I wonder what the equivalent of this was for our parents?
MC, we are ancient. Birthdays reinforce this of course…
Praxis, lovely to hear that, no matter how much the world changes, Belgacom remains the same.
Eimear, that is very cool – whatever happened to the exchange?