Surprise, surprise

I spent a while yesterday morning scattering new telephones round the house.  Our old system was a trifle Fred Karno's - and still is in part.  I've moved the not altogether ornamental fax machine up into my study, where it's connected through wiring that runs under the carpet on the landing to a rather dodgy socket in the back bedroom.  But everything else - the internet router and the base station and answering machine - is now wired to the master socket near the front door, connected wirelessly to the three or four computers and the other five extension phones. 
All this makes me ponder that it'll soon be 40 years since I entered the world of telecommunications.  Back then, you could get a telephone that stood on a table, or one that hung on the wall, and you had to rent it from the Post Office, and pay a lot extra if you wanted to unplug it and move it to another room.  Since some years earlier, you'd been allowed to choose a colour other than black, but that was about as far as it went so far as customer - excuse me: 'subscriber' - choice was concerned.  Many 'subs' were still forced to share service with a neighbour whom they might or might not know, and who could listen in to their conversations.  Mind you, in other countries, such quaintly-termed 'party lines' were shared by as many as ten subscribers.  On phoning home to Scotland, I'd often get the alternating long and short tones that told me that the equipment was engaged, sometimes with the benefit of an announcement in impeccable RP telling me 'lines from London are engaged; please try later'.  Calling my aunt and uncle in the suburbs meant dialling a two-digit routing code, then the first of the five digits of their number.  Then you had to listen as the selectors clattered around for a few seconds before dialling the last four digits: otherwise the call failed.  The rare early press-button telephones set the call up through an electronic clicker that mimicked the pulses emitted by an ordinary dial.  I remember how impressed I was when my first trunk call from home with a multifrequency tone keypad got a ring tone instantly at the other end of the country.  Indeed, for a long time, callers, used for so long to waiting several seconds for the call to snap, crackle and pop through to the other end, would hang up, convinced that they had misdialled.  And that signalling technology, though a vast improvement, is now on the point of being a thing of the past. 

Radio telephones were as near as dammit unknown - these days, every other person you meet in town has one clamped to one ear or has a thumb moving at the speed of light across a keypad, sending text messages, doubtless of world-shattering moment.  A computer with the power of the laptop that I take around with me to meetings would in those days have needed a hangar to house it, and would have heated a small block of flats.  My manpower planning colleagues who used computers had to book an hour on a teletype terminal in a noisy room down the corridor.

Such thoughts serve only to emphasise your obedient servant's dinosaur status.  But make no mistake: I love what communications technology can do for us today.  Search engines and Google Earth let me indulge an enquiring whim instantly, but I'm less happy with the expectation that an email must be answereed at once, and for that reason am not quite ready for a smartphone.  I had a principle in work days: if a piece of paper landing on my desk didn't really need an immediate response, I put it in the heap.  Once a week I'd transfer a good 90% of the heap to the waste paper basket, since that 90% would have been overtaken by events or otherwise rendered superfluous.  The same is almost certainly true of the content of my various email 'in-boxes'.  But on balance, I'm very happy that it's January 2012 and not my penurious January 1972.  And as for the new phone system, all it needs is for someone to make the first call to it.