Misc. 35: G…walior – 1 2 3!

 

Preamble

I do not know how many of you in the 1970s and 1980s had the joy of making a long distance telephone call – known as ‘trunk call’ in those days! It would be at least another 10 – 15 years before the advent of the mobile phone; even the great boon of Subscriber Trunk Dialing would be unveiled only stutteringly through the latter decade.

I was in Delhi during the 80s and my work required frequent telecommunication to my company’s units spread across the country. So I had to ‘book’ trunk calls every now and then. The following account details the painful experience.

Story

G…walior – 123 said the Operator, giving me the Ticket Number for my trunk call to Bangalore. My mind vaguely wandered wondering what worthy place women in Madras (as it then was, and don’t miss the alliteration!)) pick to instill the evasive letter of the alphabet in your mind – Gummidipoondi or Guduvancherry perhaps….. I noted down the number with due diligence. Ahead in the Trunk Call register – yes, we had to have one – were such other hopefuls as  ‘A…mbala – 321’, C…alcutta (yes, old spelling) – 213 and even one E…ngland (fancy that!) – 312 entered by my colleagues.

It was 9 O’ clock in the morning. Two peaceful hours passed and I was beginning to feel the ‘frustration of a long distance telephoner’. As I dialed (remember the word, this was rotary!) 188 – for reminders –  I braced myself mentally for a verbal duel with the operator. Though quite a common occurrence at that time, this was never an easy job in the best of circumstances and somewhat complicated in my case owing to my inadequate comprehension of Hindi, which the operator persisted on using long after it should have dawned on her that I had no more than a nodding acquaintance with the National Language!

Upon giving my local telephone number, place, name & number of the callee,  time of booking, nature of call  – oh, yes there were options Ordinary, Urgent or Lightning – particular person (shortened to ‘pp’ – please don’t take it otherwise!), and the all important ticket number (the one we started with, G…), I was the grateful recipient of its direct descendant, the Reminder Number – hurray! But the Gwalior was gone in this generation and I was left clutching a fistful of numerals. My plaintive query as to when I can expect the call to ‘mature'(what a seasoned word), the operator said she’ll put me through in – hold your breath – in ten minutes! That  sounded incredibly good but of course she never had the slightest intention of doing any such thing – that is ‘training’ my friends. Neither was I naïve enough to do a song and dance but I decided to gamely play along. That being the case, I refrained from asking her to ‘tell me another one’!

I tried again two hours later. I had no doubt that by this time the ‘ten minute’ female was away somewhere eating her ‘two minute’ noodles! A fresh number had taken her place to teach me some more ‘phone’ truths! This time I had to add the reminder number to the whole host of the Gwalior army we started with, and promptly collected Reminder No. 2. Looked like I was making arithmetical progress!

But I was in no mood to be humoured. I thought this had gone far enough and told the fresh number to spare me the reminders and get the job done. From her reply in halting English, I gathered that the whole content of her job was dishing out reminder numbers; no less, no more! How nice!!

This particular pigeon hole was named ‘delay enquiry’ and here they did nothing else. There is another one at ‘181’ who will cancel your long awaited call the moment you open your mouth; she is “Assistance”!

Over at the Exchange, with Strowgers engaging and disengaging mechanically, it must jolly work I imagine. All one has to do is to pick up the handset after the phone rings a hundred times and give the idiot caller some lily job and a load of numbers, while giggling gleefully at the fun of it all. Ever tried complaining – escalating the matter as it were? A successful call to any of the numbers listed against the Supervisors, Assistant Engineers, Divisional Engineer and the General Manager has yet to be made.

But let us not despair. The MTN (Mahanagar Telephone Nigam) does have its good points such as the Demand service. Dial 152 for Madras, and you can have a very interesting guessing game. It will be:

  1. Busy
  2. Namaskar Madras demand busy dial after ten minutes
  3. Namaskar Madras demand out of order
  4. Namaskar Madras demand ‘unget” ( a rather useful innovation)

As you can see, with options 2), 3) and 4) there is not a clue what the ending is going to be until after the first three words are monotonically uttered: an added suspense to enliven your day!

Back to G…walior 123 and my call to Bangalore. Yippee, the telephone rings at last(so far it was I doing all the calling)  and the shrill voice of the operator comes through. She sounds as though she has been suddenly swept over by a great sense of urgency! But wait: she does not disappoint. It was only to make an announcement that no body answers at the other end; no surprise – the time now was past 6 P.M.

Tomorrow, I am boarding a plane to Bangalore. I will merrily overfly the darned Gwalior!!

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