Roy's beep

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Lot of returns


Some year back the telephone was quite different then the phone’s of today. They all had cords to the handset and they were wired to the wall. In some places people had to share the phone line. This was known as a party line. When the phone rang you had to listen to the ringing of the bell to tell if the call was for you. And if you wanted to make a call you had to listen to see if there was someone talking then the line was busy. 

 Listening in was not something you were supposed to do, but we did. Now the party line had it uses generally the people on your line were your neighbors and us kid would dial our own number then hang up. The phone would ring and we would pick up and the other kid on our line would also so we could talk without making a call, till mom and dad found out then it was our pants that rang.

In the early 80’s or late 70’s there was a new phone it had a cordless handset. For those of you that do remember or never knew about this type of phone, it used radio to broadcast the call from the receiver and back from the handset, walkie-talkies, LoL.  This was a great convenience you could walk all over the house and talk on the phone no cord to hold you in place.

I was the manager and part owner of a store that sold all kind of electronic goods and the cordless phones. 
 There was this attractive lady of social prominence; 
she was the president of the local lady group, and a divorces with two teenage boys at home.  She came and bought one of our cordless phones. Now the store had a return policy, if you had the sales receipt and the box that the item came in and the unit did not work as advertize. We would refund your money. There had been story about a conversation that was over heard that came in to the store and some laughing and giggling over what was heard.  We had people wanting to have their radios fixed because they were getting phone calls on the radio. 

Now from what I was told about the call it was bit personnel. As a matter of fact it was somewhat of an XXX rated conversation.  The lady came back to the store to return the phone because it could be heard coming over the neighborhood radios. Now my partner in the store would not allow a return base on the fact the unit did work as advertize.  I heard she move to some other town.

Well thank you for stopping by, hope you had some fun.

Thank you and God bless

5 comments:

fantasy in practicality said...

it was a journey from old to new phone handsets. enjoyed every story of the transformed telephone sets.
had fun and picked up every bit of humor. nice post:))

photos by jan said...

That's funny. I remember all those old phones, and the party line. We had some kids on ours that would just leave their phone off the hook. They thought it was hilarious until we told them more about their life than they wanted us to know. Great post.

Anonymous said...

That must have been embarrassing! I'm turning red in the face just thinking about it.

Papercut Doll said...

Love this story, my first phones were the string phones - did you ever make them?

I recently walked into a shop with my son and he saw an old fashioned telephone not with buttons but with the ring that you would turn to dial. He was fascinated, I have to say I was too but for all the other reasons, I remember the first time I was allowed to use the phone to ring a friend and what a fun day that was.

Melissa Tandoc said...

And did you hear this one on the radio too? Oh Roy, this is so funny! It got me laughing for a few minutes. Well, something similar happened to us except that we heard the phone conversation in our computer...hahaha...oh but it was in Arabic. I won't translate it for you though...

I liked the evolution of phones ;)

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