I said something to a work colleague today that took me straight back more than thirty years, and I thought I’d better get the story down before it disappears forever.
I started working for BT, or British Telecom, or British Telecommunications plc depending on how you remember it, back in the days before everything had been smoothed out by the internet. I was there until 1997, when I moved to GPT, (GEC Plessey Telecommunications). That’s a whole other story.
Back in the 80s and 90s, BT still had those old red telephone boxes dotted all over the place. They’re remembered now as lovely bits of British street furniture, very iconic back in the day, but anyone who actually used them will remember a slightly different reality.
They usually smelt of wee. You also felt like you might catch something just by standing in one for too long. And, if you did manage to survive the smell, you then had to battle your way back out through a door held shut by springs so strong you practically needed to be Geoff Capes to open it (anyone under 50 may need to look him up). It was just as difficult sometimes to open these things, and the silly little handles didn't really give you any purchase!
Every so often, our BT office in Leeds would get calls from customers complaining that people were struggling to open the phone box doors, and they wanted someone to do something about it.
One of the departments we had back then was Directories. They managed Directory Enquiries, where operators gave out telephone numbers, and Directory Production, which involved producing those enormous paper phone books that used to land on everyone’s doorstep. Pre-internet life must look almost prehistoric now.
Anyway, the chap who headed up the Directories team in Leeds used to get loads of these “phone box door” calls transferred through to him from the switchboard. I’ve no idea why, other than every phone box had a paper directory in it, so someone must have decided it was vaguely connected.
It wasn’t.
Every now and again, you’d hear him answer one of these calls with something along the lines of:
“Nowt to do with me. Springs and hinges.”
I may have paraphrased that slightly, but that was the gist of it.
The funny thing is, we actually had an engineering team that looked after the springs and hinges in phone boxes. That was a real thing. Somewhere inside BT, there were people whose job included making sure the doors on red telephone boxes opened and closed properly.
So now, every so often, when someone asks me something that has absolutely nothing to do with me, I still find myself saying, “Nowt to do with me. Springs and hinges.”, which I did this morning, and remembering this story brought a smile to my face.
No big reason for this story, really. But that’s what a digital garden is for, isn’t it? A little bit of history, a little bit of nonsense, and something small that made me chuckle today.
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