A Long Distance From Home

Posted on April 12, 2014 under Storytelling with one comment

One Ringie Dingie

 

 

“Operator, well could you help me place this call?”

Operator by Jim Croce

I live about an hour and a half away from the summer home of the inventor of the telephone.  Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel (Ma Bell?) vacationed in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.  They called their property “Beinn Bhreagh”, which roughly translated means “Make collect calls any time you get the chance”.

My office is in the original Switchboard building in Antigonish.  Ron, the owner of the building and also my business colleague, has collected many old phones which are kept on display as you come in to the office.  He even found an old switchboard that graces the foyer as you enter the building.  Phones have gone through many radical transformations over the years and now very few people even have land lines any more.  And if you have children or grandchildren, you know that using the phone in a traditional manner is passé.

Mercifully, long distance telephone charges have come down through the years through a combination of competition and technology.

But this wasn’t always the case.

In 1976, I began my short-lived teaching career in the town of Fairview, Alberta.  Prior to my arrival, I had arranged to rent an apartment which seemed like the logical thing to do.  Four other friends from the east coast had also been hired by the same school board.  I am not certain what they were thinking but they arrived in town only days before the school year began and none of them had a place to stay.  In very short order, my two bedroom apartment was fully occupied.

The first month could easily be described as chaotic.  We were all rookie teachers, flying by the seats of our pants.  We still had the “party gene” very much intact after our university days.  And a few of the guys had serious female relationships still percolating on the east coast.

The telephone was easily the most important item in the apartment.  Invariably, one of the five was on the phone.  The length of some of the conversations made the Boston Marathon seem like a 5K fun run.   Especially if alcohol was involved.  Which was often.

Early in October, the first phone bill arrived.  Of course the listing was in my name.  Back in those days, the phone company actually printed out statements detailing every call.  The envelope was very thick.  The phone bill was long.  Thirteen pages long, to be exact.  I casually flipped through the pages and came to the total on the last page: $1200.

Do you have any idea of what a $1200 phone bill was like back in 1976?  If you applied the long term inflation rate of 3% over a 38 year period, you would come up with about $3746 in today’s dollars.

The boys had just arrived home from school.  It was a Friday.  Oh, I failed to mention that my (our) apartment was exactly two doors down from the liquor store.  I waited until the first few beers had found their mark before pulling out the phone bill.

Several hours and several rum and cokes later, one of the guys came up with a novel solution to the telephone problem.  He simply went into the kitchen and pulled the entire apparatus, including the cord off the wall.  Poor Alexander G. Bell must have been rolling over in his grave.

Monday arrived and we all traipsed into the staff room.  Everyone was commiserating about the weekend past and the week ahead.  My friend, the one who had removed the phone from its moorings, was the last to enter the room.  He was pulling the phone along the floor by the cord, as you might do with an uncooperative puppy.  He was whistling to the phone as if he were giving it instructions.  He threw the 13 pages of the phone bill up in the air and let out a mighty roar.

To this day, I am not sure if the staff ever really understood what hit them when the “five wise men from the east”, (a term coined by our principal, Norm,) arrived in their sedate town.  I should ring them up and ask.

I think I’ll call collect.