campbell@redsox.bsw.com (Larry Campbell) (09/21/89)
{{{ Yep...that header is right. This is message 12 of 11. A missing }}} {{{ seperator line caused this message to get sucked into #11, so I'm }}} {{{ reposting it correctly. Sorry for the confusion. -chip }}} Eight years ago, I spent a few nights in a hotel in Gort, Ireland. Gort was so small that ("How... small... was it?") the telephone number of the hotel was 7. That's not a typo; the number was 7. (OK, they did have a second line, and that number was 27.) One night, I returned to the hotel about 1 AM and found it locked. The town wasn't too small to have an all-night donut shop crowded with policemen; they told me to go to the phone booth down the street and tell the operator to ring up the hotel manager at home. I went to the phone booth and encountered -- a hand-cranked telephone! With no dial! Just like you see in silent movies! I had no idea how to work the thing -- the instructions were completely obliterated by graffiti -- and it took several experiments to discover that FIRST you turn the crank and THEN you pick up the earpiece. (I was doing it backwards.) A few minutes after the operator rang him up for me, the hotel manager drove up, looking a bit rumpled, and let me in. Do I win the prize for Most Ancient Telephone Equipment Actually Observed in Regular Operation This Decade? Larry Campbell The Boston Software Works, Inc. campbell@bsw.com 120 Fulton Street wjh12!redsox!campbell Boston, MA 02146 [Moderator's Note: And you sir, win a lifetime subscription to TELECOM Digest. Lucky you! Thanks for a humorous close to this issue of the Digest. In the Digest second edition for Friday, issued about 1:00 AM CDT, a detailed discussion of telex, TWX, clock service and Western Union in general by Larry Lippman and others. PT]