Did she really just ask me if I remember rotary dial phones?
It’s 2015, and I’m approaching my 50th birthday. My ad sales job at The Chronicle Herald has me sharing office space with people half my age, and as I consider the question posed by the young woman who I find leaning against my cubicle, there’s just no way I can afford to have this conversation.
If I come clean and admit that rotary dial phones represent maybe the fifth generation of telephones in my half-century relationship with the device, her next question is surely to be, “Wow, did you know Alexander Graham Bell?”
I’d have to begin by telling her there’s a woman who still lives in my hometown in Mabou, and they call her “Sally Central,” and that she’ll be blowing out 100 candles on her next birthday cake. Of course, I’d have to explain why the 99-year-old native of nearby Glencoe Station had come by her moniker and how her family represented some of my earliest memories of using a telephone.
You see, Sally (born Sarah MacMillan) was predeceased by her husband, Angus “Central” Beaton, some 24 years earlier, and the Beatons – one of many Beaton families in the area – had received its special nickname because Angus’s mother, Mary Ann, had operated the local telephone switchboard out of their home for years.
If you were looking to call someone outside of your immediate community, you had to call the central switchboard, where Mary Ann would greet you with a single word – “Central!” – before putting your call through.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’d have to explain that our family’s phone number in those days was “17, ring four,” because our telephone exchange was 17, and within our party line our neighbours need only turn the crank on their wall-mounted telephone four times to have the phone ring in our kitchen.
Of course, I’d tell her about how every New Year’s Eve, people up and down our road would crank their phones incessantly to literally ring in the new year as clocks struck 12.
By now, I’m sure she’d think I was pulling her leg – having fun at her expense. But if she was still buying my story, I’d eventually have to tell her about how we paid our phone bill every month, and that would be sure to send her for a loop!
Every time I suffer through an army of chatbots as I try to reach an actual human being at Bell Aliant, I’m reminded of the company’s predecessor, MT&T. “MT&T” stood for Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company, and when I was a kid, the company had already been providing telecommunication service to Nova Scotians for more than half a century.
Back in those days, there were no threatening phone calls if your bill was past due. Instead, there was a friendly visit from John MacPhee, a gentle old soul, if ever there was one. When John wasn’t tending his herd of cattle at his farm a 10-minute drive up our road, he was moonlighting as MT&T’s local bill collector.
If his visits to our house were any indication, John must surely have spent more time collecting for the phone company that he did running his farm. Sometimes accompanied by his wife Marie, John would casually grab a seat at the kitchen table, as a cup of tea and a sweet was an expected part of the transaction that was about to take place.
Tucked under John’s arm was the ever-present Moir’s Pot of Gold box with elastic bands holding its lid shut. Inside the box was a small stack of bills and the payments he had earlier received from our neighbours.
I’m not sure if he had tea at every house, but judging from the casual nature of his visits to ours, I wouldn’t bet against it.
So, to answer the question she’s not going to get to ask, I didn’t know Alexander Graham Bell. But I did know a time long before phone apps and chatbots, and I’m grateful for having had those experiences. They are memories I draw on every time I have to wait on hold with Bell Aliant.