Image: L. M Ericsson (Sweden) really started something with this design in 1932. Many countries followed with their own versions including England and Australia, with our 300 and 400 series. My mother had a phone like this in her living room right up until the 1990s.
Forty-two years ago, I used to pay Telecom linesmen. I was a payroll clerk at Metro North in Brisbane, Magan-djin. We paid in cash because the linies refused to take a cheque or have the money transferred to their bank account. I would go out to the Substation where they worked and call out their names and hand them an envelope with the money inside which they would sign for. We didn’t ask for ID. Everything was done on trust. This was the most rewarding part of my working week.
In the same year, 1982, we were told that Telecom was to be corporatised. Sure enough, it became Telstra, and the Labor government began the process of privatisation, which was completed by Howard in the 1990s.
The rest of my working week was consumed by taking complaints from subscribers. They weren’t called customers then. The subscribers were complaining about their bills. The biggest complaints were from people ringing overseas using the international subscriber dialling system introduced in 1976. STD or subscriber trunk dialling was a big source of complaint. Usually, the calls were made by someone living in the house, a visitor, a relative, or a teenage child.
Those were the days before privatisation, which was the worst thing any government could have done.
Telecom had a surplus of over a billion dollars each year. Some of that money was used to provide services in the regional Australia at great expense but no extra charge to the subscriber. Telecom could have built any kind of advanced system while it remained in public hands.
But no, Hawke and Keating knew better. Shame on them. Shame on the people that let it happen.
Here is an excellent story by Lee, a maintenance technician who worked for Telecom back in the day.
Ian Curr, editor 3 Jan 2025
–oOo–
Noisy phone
I have a noisy phone. After 40+ years as a Telstra maintenance tech I thought I knew a thing or two about phone faults, so after isolating the problem to the handset itself, I went online at 17.43 to report a fault. All I wanted to know was how do I get their handset replaced? Apparently, that simple question had the fault chat line stumped. I knew what the problem was. It was not the modem nor the line or handset cord, so I didn’t see the need to do the series of online tests they wanted me to do. Switching the Telstra modem on and off would definitely not fix the issue (had they been watching the tv comedy, the IT Crowd?). I also insisted that handing the fault off to NBN would get the problem out of their queue but would not fix my problem and that any technician coming to my home in days/weeks time would simply discover that the Telstra handset itself was cactus as I already told them.
All I needed to know at that moment was how do I get the bloody handset replaced? In the olden days, the handset hanging off the first socket was considered part of the service and was the property of Telstra. It even says that, it is printed on the phone if you look underneath it. My current service contract also says I am billed by Telstra, not by the NBN who are simply the carrier. An hour later, at 18.42, I was still on the chat line trying for a simple answer after being handed off from someone called Simon to someone called Carla.
It was not Carla’s fault, of course, that the script she operated from did not have an answer to my simple question. I still don’t know for sure before I cut my losses and hung up but it seemed I was being told that I needed to make an appointment to see someone at a “Telstra Shop” the nearest one being three suburbs away.
Who said on-line searches are efficient and save everyone time? Talking to a live operator would have solved my issue in less than a minute assuming of course I was speaking with an employee based in this country and who was not themselves a third party employee working in an offshore country reading off a flow-chart script designed to sell me something I didn’t need rather than fix a real problem!
Lee Walkington
3 Jan 2025