FROM THE ARCHIVES:The ordeal of getting a landline 30 years ago from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, which ran the phone system long before mobiles and wifi, was explained by Elgy Gillespie in this Irishman's [sic] Diary.
No phone? Join the club, gentle readers, and start training carrier pigeons, or whittling your cleft sticks. For the 92,000 who languish incommunicado in this land of vandalised kiosks, mushrooming estates, or industries and quaint little country exchanges where a phone call to the green, green grass of home may take several hours and will sound like ack-ack fire from the top of the Kippure mast: for all of you would-be subscribers we have information.
Or, rather, the Minister, Mr. Albert Reynolds, has it. Two weeks ago, he announced that 1,000 school-leavers are being taken on in the P and T to learn basic installation. Some 15,000 of the phoneless are to be connected within the next three months, most of them in Dublin, and some of whom have been waiting six, or seven, years or more. Some 25 big new trunk exchanges are on order and the £100 million voted towards the P and T after the Post Office Review Group’s recommendations is going on new STD equipment from Telectron (with CIT Alkatel [sic]) and Ericsson’s, a Swedish firm with a plant in Athlone.
There are two ways of being left in the lurch. You can have no slot in the exchange in which to put your two little wires to carry your number. Or, you can have no cable to carry the pair of wires down your street and into your house. If your exchange is congested, as it probably is, you will have to wait at least two years after a decision has been made to expand it. If a cable is your problem you will have to wait till the road has been dug from your exchange up your street and through your front door.
The P and T like to point out that if they reach their target of 60,000 for this year, scaling upwards year by year to 120,000 in 1983, we will have the most advanced telephone system in Europe. There will be phones dripping from every brick, or at any rate one for every 10 of the population. Do I hear hollow laughter? I include this merely to keep you up-to-date, oh phoneless ones, before describing to you the lengths to which some folks are being driven in search of contactability.
This reporter plumped for a bleep when it turned out all else had failed. Bleeps are small metallic instruments that clip on the pocket or handbag and go “oink, oink” or in some cases “ding, dong”, generally when you’re somewhere embarrassing like the theatre. After that, a girl’s voice comes on, and repeats a message verbatim which has previously been phoned into her.
This reporter had to send her bleep back after the first few days because she only got two messages. One was: “Your pregnancy test has proved positive.” The other was private and I’m not telling you. Both of them were jokes perpetrated by evil-minded colleagues in the newspaper business.