That darned telephone...

Some telephone trivia....

“Jo is the only girl I know who phones round all her girlfriends to tell them how enormous the latest phone bill has been.” (Written by me after a particularly enormous bill - 8th Feb 1991)

Did you know red telephone boxes were made with slightly sloping floors so that ‘unpleasant liquids’ could drain out.

L S Lowry had a telephone with no bell. He said he had the telephone for his convenience not for others.

More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

The international telephone dialling code for Antarctica is 672.

Mother's Day is (allegedly) the busiest day of the year for the telephone companies.

Women can talk longer with less effort than can men. That has been proved repeatedly. Why? Because the vocal cords of women are shorter than those of men and so release less air through them to carry the sound. It's all a matter of breathing.

From the August, 1906 Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company
directory for San Francisco, California . . .
How to Answer a Telephone Call: Remove the hand telephone from the hook and say "Here is Main 297" (or whatever your number may be). The party calling should say "Here is Main 298," (or whatever the number may be). Much friction and annoyance will be avoided if this simple plan is carried out.


The American Bell Telephone system was named after Alexander Graham Bell. However, the Canadian Bell Telephone system wasn't named for Alexander Graham Bell. It was named for his father, Alexander Melville Bell. Being a good son, he gave is father the Canadian rights to the telephone.

The use of telephone answering machines became popular in 1974.

The year 1879 saw the first use of telephone numbers at Lowell, Massachusetts. During an epidemic of measles, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker feared that Lowell's four operators might succumb to the disease and bring about a paralysis of telephone service. He recommended the use of numbers rather than individual names for calling the more than 200 subscribers. This way, substitute operators could be more easily trained, in the event of such an emergency.

Why are calculators and telephone key-pads set the oposite way round?
Before the touch-tone phone, of course, rotary dials were the rule. There is no doubt that the touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the "1" on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom. When AT&T contemplated the design of their key pad, they called several calculator companies, hoping they would share the research that led them to the opposite configuration. It seems the calculator companies had conducted no research at all. It has also been suggested that if the lower numbers were on the bottom, the alphabet would then start on the bottom and be in reverse alphabetical order, a confusing setup. This might have entered AT&T's thinking, particularly in the "old days" when phone numbers contained only five digits, along with two exchange letters. (In the UK it was three letters and four digits; our phone at home being STO1936.)


"The great advantage [the telephone] possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus consists in the fact that it requires no skill to operate the instrument." - Alexander Graham Bell, 1878
(He obviously didn’t have my Nokia!)

A Letter from the Bank

I had a letter from my bank the other day and my immediate reaction was to ring up my bank manager and complain. Then I recalled I don’t have a bank manager and I hate phoning at the best of times. When I worked... No, I’ll rephrase that. When I was employed in a job as opposed to being a part-time house husband, part-time parent and part-time carer (of myself) I had to make telephone calls. I did not enjoy making telephone calls but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. They don’t allow any sort of assessment of the other person’s reaction, they reduce think before you speak (and put foot in it) time and are generally no substitute for a face to face conversation or a well thought-out memo.

Then, one day, I rose to those dizzy heights where I had a secretary, who very quickly became a P.A. and a close colleague, and, even more quickly, became indispensable. My life changed in a way which it hadn’t done since my last child was born! (And, like all good P.A.s she remains a friend to this day.)

Firstly, I had someone to screen my calls. I had never been one to shy away from taking calls from the public – unlike many of my colleagues – but there were plenty of officials I shied away from if possible. No longer could the telephone dictate my life. Have you ever tried getting past a secretary who wants her boss to have five minutes peace or an uninterrupted conversation with a member of staff. I can guarantee if the secretary or P.A. is any good it’s impossible.

Secondly, I had someone to take all those routine calls off my back. No longer did I have to ring a colleague to agree a meeting time and place, or answer a minor query – I had a P.A. to talk to their P.A. And, (yes, I know it was naughty) this even extended into the big outside world so if I was going to be five minutes late picking Richard up from school or needed the car booking into a garage, I had someone to do it for me.

Imagine how I crashed down to earth when I left work. Suddenly I had to make some of these calls myself. Jo made some of them for me but there were some she couldn’t for the simple reason that she was out at work. Incoming calls were no problem – everyone spoke to an answerphone; as they do to this day.

Despite my dislike of the phone I carried on making calls for a while until one day it all became too much. My stress and heart problems had already exacerbated a short fuse which tended to get lit whenever I came across blatant inefficiency and bureaucracy. Then, I came across people who called me a liar. Take, for example, the call centre person in India who told me that I couldn’t have been expecting an engineer to install an extra Sky box for the kitchen because it wasn’t on the computer. The last call shown on the computer was twelve months earlier. The fact that I had the Sky box, delivered efficiently by Royal Mail, in my hand and a piece of paper which said when the engineer was due, was irrelevant. I was wrong. I hadn’t called in the last twelve months. The phone got slammed down and has hardly ever been picked up since.

By agreeing passwords one can arrange for one’s partner to speak to certain organisations on one’s behalf. However, as a security measure they demand to speak to me first so I can give them the password. If I were in a civil partnership and not a marriage I wouldn’t have to speak at all but unfortunately Jo cannot imitate a male. What, I ask myself is the purpose of this ridiculous rule which simply ensures that 50% of the population cannot make a call on your behalf by pretending to be you but the other 50% can!

Then there are banks which demand a male voice for the whole phone call. They, of course, are in a different time zone (it’s 3 a.m. and they are bored and tired and it’s the monsoon season and they’ve a long way to cycle home) and couldn’t care less about your £120 problem since that is more than their annual take home pay! And, it was the bank’s latest missive that sent me down this whole road but I sidetracked myself so much the original story will have to wait for another day.....