We didn’t get a phone until 1969. My mother was nervous of them, and didn’t see the need. As soon as I was working and earning money I insisted on getting a phone installed, and within a fortnight my mother was wondering how we’d ever managed without one.
In those days you had a party line. This meant you shared the line with at least one other household; if they were using it you couldn’t, and vice versa. This usually worked out all right, but in 1988 I found that the party line household were deliberately leaving their phone “off the hook” so that I couldn’t use the line. Whenever I picked up, there was the sound of their domesticity; I shouted, I even blew a whistle, but they were obviously enjoying it. It took days before the phone company could do anything about it.
I started getting obscene phone calls. Of course, when I dialled 1471, it was “number withheld”. The crunch came when I got home from work to a long, obscene message on my answerphone, which I had to play before I could delete it. I asked the phone company to block my line to anonymous calls; they warned me that it could cause problems if institutions like hospitals or the police wanted to call me, but I decided that in case of emergency they could get round it. I did discover that some people routinely block their number even on innocent phone calls. I was standing for election once, and a resident was very indignant that he couldn’t phone me without disclosing his number.
The next step was to go for TPS. I was reluctant to do it, but I was getting more and more of those annoying sales calls. Since going TPS (I don’t know how one expresses that elegantly) I’ve only had a couple of sales calls (including from my own phone provider) and I’ve been able to complain successfully about them. But there’s one annoyance that even TPS can’t stop; the scam calls from overseas. Your caller display shows “external call (out of area)”. If you answer it there will be a short silence and then a female American voice kicks in with, “Congratulations!” I rarely let it go further than that. I’ve learned that the quickest way of dealing with it is to press the call button and then immediately press the off button. But these calls can happen daily, often several times a day, for a week at a time. Why are we helpless to do anything about them? Why is it possible for these computerised crooks to cause annoyance, and real distress to vulnerable people, with nothing to stop them? They must be making enough out of it to make it worthwhile, by inducing people to send money. Is anything being done to trace them?
I Wish to Complain 