My First Phone (was Re: Twenty Years Ago Today 1-Jan-2004)

From: Al Gillis <alg_at_aracnet.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 16:13:59 -0800

(Much snippage...)

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Interesting how you mention your very
> own first telephone. I first got subscribed under my own name back in
> 1960, when I moved out from living with Mommie Dearest to my own
> little place in Hyde Park (the U of C neighborhood on the south side
> of Chicago.) The monthly bill was around six or seven dollars and my
> roomate and I agreed to split the bill but each be responsible for
> our own long distance charges and or telegrams which were sent by
> phone. Illinois Bell did not ask for deposits, or run credit checks,
> etc. You simply called them one day and they came out the next day to
> put the phone in. They trusted you to pay the bill when it arrived.

> We decided on a green 'palmolive' color rotary dial phone and since
> we lived in an apartment-hotel with a switchboard the phone man put in
> a phone with a turn-button: one side of the turn button was the switch-
> board phone (DOrchester 3-7500), the other side of the turn button
> was our private phone (HYDe Park 3-3714). We did have a bell-chime
> device to ring the phone (it sounded like a doorbell) and we had to
> pay fifty-cents per month for that side ringer. Touch tone was not
> available. ESS features were still ten years distant for the
> downtown Chicago area and fifteen years distant for the other areas of
> Chicago. PAT]

When I ordered My First Telephone the Business Office customer service representative finally got to the question about color. Somehow I was evidently thinking of television and responded that I'd like "a black and white set". Well -- that clearly touched a raw nerve for this Lily Tomlin-like CSR. She spent several minutes explaining to me that this was the TELEPHONE and should not be compared to other services I might use and that two-tone telephone sets were not available and would I prefer a BLACK set or one of the half-dozen colors they offered? Feeling sufficiently chastised, I asked for plain black and we went on with the ordering process. Hoping to save a much money as possible I selected a rotary dial and no extensions!

Them were the days!

Al

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There were a lot of Lilly Tomlin-like service reps in those days. But truth be told, telco employees got a lot of grief from the customers also. Somewhere around, I have a sort of ragged, torn up copy of a 1923 directory from Chicago Telephone Company. I think it was the last year of Chicago Telephone, before they were bought out by the Bell consortium and changed into Illinois Bell. On the front cover down in the corner was a little announcement saying, 'Our subscribers are requested to speak in the same courteous, non-abusive way to our operators which they expect to hear in return. Would you want our operators to curse at you? It is not their fault if a line is engaged when you try to reach it.'

And that was altogether too common: A rude, crude person (usually a man but not always) would ask for a number that historically was always busy -- such as the train or bus station information line -- and upon being told for the umpteenth time that 'the lion is busy' and respond with a string of curse words in the operator's ear, as if she could have corrected the problem had she been competent and not too lazy to do so. And anytime an operator or customer service rep cursed at a subscriber -- and they sometimes lost their 'cool' and did so, chances are likely they were fired on the spot. PAT] Received on Thu Jan 08 2004 - 16:13:59 PST