Many years ago at the tender age of sixteen I began work as an apprentice telephone engineer. I started on “poles and ‘oles”, which meant learning about the business of connecting the telephone in people’s houses to the telephone exchange. There calls were steered to their destination at the touch of a dial. It was all very physical in those days, but much has changed. I was part of that change as were thousands of workers throughout the UK and the world.
Just today, as I write this, the final nail (copper I hope)
has been nailed into my career coffin. I
have gone over: I have a new router and have plugged our two old fashioned analogue
telephones into a little thing moulded onto a conventional electricity plug. Henceforth
my calls, the few that I do not make or take on my mobile, will be carried
across the Internet in packets.
I have many tales about my early experiences during those
long-forgotten bygone days, but they will be safely lodged in the growing list
of word files that I have titled ‘Remember Me’ and I will someday bequeath to
my offspring. They will know what to do with them.
So, very briefly, I have enjoyed the journey from clunky old
electromechanical switches carrying analogue telephone calls, through to the
miniature chip-based switches carrying digital calls. After that came the integration
of telephony and computing and, believe it or not, I wrote the first book on that,
yes, and the only song! I then ploughed my furrow through the introduction of the
new mobile telephone system that could carry goodly quantities of data as well
as voice and finished up by writing a
book about the beautiful film star Heddy Lamarr who is sometimes claimed as its
inventor.
Tiring of treading down the upward escalator of technology I switched and became an Oxford tour guide and an author of books on many different things, anything but technology. Along the way a marketing-oriented friend once asked me why I didn’t write books that people wanted to read. Dumbfounded, I did not reply just then.
Whoops, sorry, got to finish here, my analogue telephone connected
to the lump on an electrical plug is ringing. Maybe this is the call from the
Internet that will provide me with the answer.
