I lived in a large house, well really a castle, in Ireland as a child. It had one telephone placed under the stairs, made of Bakelite, with a circular label like a now defunct tax disc that read DUNLEER 5. This was useful if you forgot your number. On the side was a handle that you turned to alert the operator in Dunleer post office that you wished to make a call. You gave her the desired number, or just the name if it was a neighbour, and then waited for her to call back when she had made the connection. Captains of industry and millionaires may still use this system today. It had its drawbacks: calls at night or at mealtimes were discouraged so as not to inconvenience the operator or her children who sometimes deputised. Once a request for a London number elicited the response, “I’ve never called cross-channel before but I’ll give it a try”. Also the operators were early adopters of the “your call may be monitored” regime; they usually were. Frankly, I found the telephone rather intimidating and left it to my more sophisticated siblings and family to use.
This was a handicap when I went to work as a broker in the City but one that I overcame. As recently as 1981 my firm had almost the same telephone system as I was familiar with from home. I would pick up the handset and ask Eileen to connect me to a number. It was as well to be on good terms with Eileen and her staff if you wanted to get through in a timely fashion. I was on such good terms, or was making so many calls, that she connected me to an outside line when I lifted the receiver and I was able to make my own calls; a notable privilege.
Now business communication is done by e mail and IM (instant messenger) with much less emphasis on ‘phone calls. So when my Kindle refused to work I was surprised to be invited by Amazon to let them call me either at once or in five minutes. Remembering the endless waiting to get through to an operator at most UK utilities I opted for the instant call back and checked that I didn’t need to leave the house for at least an hour. The call back was instantaneous and there was a real and unbelievably helpful operator, and this on a Sunday afternoon in London. For her it was Sunday morning as she was, she told me, in Kentucky. Quick Service is what I got and, if you haven’t read it recently, I recommend this P G Wodehouse novel published in 1940, the year that he was taken prisoner by the Germans at his home in Le Touquet. In Ireland an Irish army soldier sat by the Bakelite ‘phone throughout The Emergency, as the Second World War was called in Ireland, to receive news of any enemy invasion; a great inconvenience to the household.