Using barbed wire fences to create a telephone network makes so much sense, but it was new to me until I stumbled upon this fascinating article. Always enjoy reading about rural ingenuity. Favourite fact: the barbed wire networks sometimes used corn cobs, cow horns, or glass bottles as insulators!
Lori Emerson’s website seems full of interesting projects, and I especially love the table of contents from her upcoming book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook.
We started getting early morning spam phone calls on our landlines a few years ago (our house has an apartment for my mother). Early as in 6:30 a.m. early. My mother was not usually out of bed or, if she was, she was getting dressed or in the bathroom, and she would rush to answer the phone. As her mobility decreased, I was afraid this would all end in a fall.
To prevent a possible tumble, I started taking her kitchen phone off the hook every morning when I got up. I’d hear a dial tone followed by a ring noise and then a voice telling me to hang up and try my call again (apparently known as an intercept message). After the message was repeated twice, a rapid busy signal would start and eventually would go dead after a long period.
My mother would replace the handset when she was in the kitchen and ready for her day, and if someone called to tell her that her Windows machine was acting up or she had won a cruise, she was awake and ready to hang up on them. This was an easy solution to an annoying problem.
We have two phone lines in our house. Our copper line was replaced in 2021 by a fibre optic cable that gives us internet, television and telephone. As my mother doesn’t use the internet, and we are able to wirelessly bounce a television signal from the Bell Home Hub modem to give her television, we decided at that time to leave her copper telephone line as it was.
Until Bell Aliant sent out letters earlier this year. The first informed us that if my mother’s copper line broke, they wouldn’t fix it and my mother would have to get a fibre line, which was fair enough, I suppose. That was followed a month later by another letter saying they would be cancelling her phone service by August if she didn’t switch to their fibre service. A classic Bell passive-aggressive move.
As we already had the fibre line and Home Hub in our house, it was an easy matter of some magic person left over from Island Tel days doing some programming at the Bell Aliant office in Charlottetown and rerouting my mother’s phone number to our modem (each of the Home Hubs has room for two phone lines). We lucked out again and had a tech come to our house (another Island Tel vet nearing retirement) who was able to make things work in our basement to easily route from our modem to my mother’s phone.
The morning following the switch, I picked up my mother’s handset expecting to hear the regular pattern. As I moved around her kitchen, I heard the dial tone followed by the signal to warn that the phone was off the hook, but no gentle, helpful voice.
I thought that was the end of the voice, but a couple of weeks later I was looking after a friend’s house while she was away and remembered she still had her copper line service, so I had one last visit with the Bell Aliant voice:
Anyone know who recorded this message? It certainly sounds like an Atlantic Canadian voice, maybe PEI but could be Newfoundland or Cape Breton, too. Recorded on tape? A copy of a copy of a copy? Let me know what you know, and please try your call again.
My mother and I were talking about the characters that she knew years ago, funny friends and neighbours, customers at her general store. One fellow was George Palmer, who lived just up the road from the store with his wife, Dora. I don’t remember either of them, but have heard lots of tales.
Even into the 1990s, we had a party telephone line that was shared with other people. By the end, there was just one other family on our line, but there would have been dozens on the line at one time. Each telephone subscriber had their own distinctive ring that would alert them to an incoming call, so you had to know your pattern and were only to answer if it was yours. George, though, would listen to every call that came on his line, but his hearing wasn’t great in later years, so he would occasionally blurt out “Speak up, me son!” if he thought he was missing some juicy news.
Mom said George loved to play April Fool’s jokes. One April first he pulled up in his horse and wagon to deliver eggs to their store, which was having a very busy day. The eggs would be in a little crate on the back of the wagon and my father would go out and take them in to the store, grade them, and credit the amount to George’s account. George pulled up and yelled “Phillips!” and my father went out to get the eggs. Just as he neared the wagon, George slapped the reins, geed up the horse and yelled “April Fool’s!” as he drove away.
I have 40 hours of 8mm film my father took starting about 1960, and I remembered a short clip of a man in a horse and buggy on the road in front of our old house. It’s the only film I have of someone in a horse and buggy, so it’s a short but important memory of a time when horses were still the main source of transportation for some. George would be one of the last men in our area who never owned a car or truck. I showed the clip to my mother, and she is pretty sure it is him, the jokester, and at the end of the clip, you can see his house off in the distance as he drives down the road past my grandfather’s house.
