Oh for the days of the good old directory inquiries

As sure as God made little green apples and gave man the wit to turn them into something as delicious as calvados, you’d not only have the number in seconds, but also as likely as not you would also have the latest opinion on the place from the helpful operators at the exchange.

It seems strange to say it now, but dialling for directory inquiries (or anything else for that matter), was considered by many as a much less efficient way of using the telephone compared with the days when the operators on the district exchanges (Millbrook and Gorey are two which spring to mind) could not only connect you to whoever you were calling, but were also a mine of information on their likely whereabouts if there was no reply.

Then we got phones with dials – four digits to start with and then only in town on the Central Exchange, followed by five and now six – and then, wonder of wonders, there was a demonstration, probably in the early 1960s, in Le Gallais’s store on the corner of Minden Place and Bath Street of subscriber trunk dialling for calls to the United Kingdom.

STD, as it was abbreviated to at the time, was about as far removed as it is possible to get from what that acronym now stands for in the permissive days of the 21st century.

That juggling of the old grey matter which led to those memories came about because Herself and her mate are on their annual shopping expedition to Southampton – where, I am reliably informed, things that they are interested in buying are much cheaper than they are here, and that’s with heaven knows how many per cent added for VAT.

She rang the other day to ask me to look up the address and phone number of an old school friend of hers who lives in a small town on the south coast and who they intended to phone and then visit.

‘If you look up the contact list on the computer – the one we use for Christmas cards – you’ll find it,’ she said.

Look up the contact list on the computer indeed. It takes me all my time to switch the thing on, never mind do anything else. Two hours later and I was in a right pickle, so I thought the easiest thing to do was to see if it was listed under ‘phone book’ on the internet – something I’d seen Herself do a couple of times.

The woman’s surname is relatively uncommon and I had remembered her husband’s name, and sure enough I found it – only to establish that, yes, there were two entries in that town and one of them was in his name.

However, for further information, such as the number I was looking for, I either had to subscribe to this internet service or dial the director inquiries number on the screen.

What a scam. What an absolute con. The bloke who answered spoke rapidly and with a north American accent and despite me telling him the person’s surname and Christian name, along with the middle initial, he first told me about the second entry for that name – the other one I’d seen on my screen.

I repeated the correct name twice and told him that if someone as useless on a computer as I am could find the two entries, surely someone like him, who did all that for a living, would be a bit more competent.

He repeated the incorrect entry again and then, because I still had his organisation’s website on screen, it dawned on me that he was spinning out the call because they were making 99p (it’s a quid, really) a minute out of me.

He was probably in mid-sentence when I put the receiver down. I got the distinct impression that he was being deliberately vague in order to keep me on the phone as long as he could and I didn’t like it one little bit.

Bring back the nice, polite and helpful local operators we used to have is all I have to say about that service.

As to the number Herself wanted, when she rang back she took me through an idiot’s guide to how to get into the Christmas card list on our juke box and, after a while, I found what she wanted. Perhaps I’ll get a halfway decent bottle of something from duty free as a reward.

NOT surprisingly, I have a lot of sympathy for Eugene McCarthy, whose attempt to put two plastic windows in his Wellington Road home – where all the other windows are plastic, as are his neighbour’s – was rejected.

The historic buildings officer (with a salary to match, no doubt) said that PVC was not a traditional material for windows and top hung is not a traditional method of opening them, before adding that the house makes a positive contribution to ‘the street’ – a statement which makes you wonder whether the officer knows where Wellington Road is, never mind visited the area.

I cannot do better than to repeat an online comment on this latest piece of planning stupidity: ‘Dear historic building officer, Traditionally 19th century buildings did not have plastic guttering on the outside, nor ready access to electricity, clean running water, nor plumbed sewage. I presume these will also be removed from the property, in keeping with tradition.’

Incidentally, I don’t blame the officer for doing her job. I blame the politicians sitting on the applications panel. This nonsense shouldn’t even warrant an application.

AND finally . . . It takes a particularly nasty piece of lowlife to try to cheat a hospice charity shop. Television cameras monitored at police headquarters, perhaps?