Can you hear me up there Shirley ?

Writing of the office photocopier yesterday got me thinking of other remarkable inventions of our time, and how I was around to see them on their first introduction to the market...

Like mobile phones for instance.

I was working for the same electrical contractors, but I'd emigrated, been forcefully emigrated, sort of ethnic cleansed from Leeds to Newcastle by the bosses at head office and at some point of my sojourn in the North East the office manager decided that too many of us surveyors and supervisors were going AWOL during the day when we were out visiting building sites and that it would be a good idea to have some sort of mobile communication with us.

Up until that point if he needed to speak to us during the day he had to ring around every single building site that he could think of in the hope that he'd find us stood right next to the phone at the instant that he rang. Of course what normally happened was that he'd ring a site that we'd just left three minutes earlier or he'd ring a site that we were actually on but the site agent in the office couldn't be arsed to go fetch us to the phone so he'd deny we were there.

So he rang the only company in the whole of the UK who were licenced to provide mobile communications in the 1970's, Aircall.

Aircalls main business was providing pagers to the medical industry, but they did a line of pagers for general use which had a variable range of radio signals, on a good day, and if you were in a major connurbation and not inside a steel building then maybe, just maybe you'd get a bleep, then all you had to do was find a publc phone box that worked, a not inconsiderable feat of achievement - people tend to forget that nine out of ten public phone boxes were permenantly vandalised in the days before mobile phones, its why mobile phones were invented actually.

We weren't too impressed with the idea of a pager that had a variable success rate - what we really wanted was a telephone inside each of our cars, a big black telephone that looked nothing like todays mobile phones, they were proper big telephones fastened to a big box in the front of your car.

The Aircall rep came to see us and three of us trooped down to his car which had one of the phones fitted in it, Shirley the ageing mother hen figure in the office stayed upstairs to man the phones.

We sat in the Aircall reps car staring at the telephone box which was screwed to his dashboard with brackets, it was at least as big as a payphone box which meant that the front seat passenger didn't have a lot of legroom left to sit in, I was shoved into the front seat by my boss and he sat in the back to watch.

The Aircall rep explained how the waveband that the telephones used was strictly controlled and was part of the emergency services waveband, Aircall probably shouldn't have been using it for private companies but as long as you took an oath not to use oaths on air and to use the proper style of talking while on air then they would licence you for a few of these precious handsets.

He shoved the phone into my hand and gave me a quick lesson, basically you had to pretend to be a policeman when you were using the phone just in case a policeman was listening in or your phone interfered with a nearby police station communications, you couldn't joke or mess about and had to use the phonetic alphabet and say "over" at the end of every line.

To ring the office, which was right in front of us, in fact we could still see Shirley through the window, we had to first of all ring the Aircall operator and book a call, the rep did this for me and then we sat and waited until the operator rang us back to say she'd made the connection.

The phone rang with a loud "brrrrinnnnnggggg" and I picked it up, inbetween lots of crackling and a loud buzzing noise I could just hear Shirley at the other end shouting down the line "Hello, hello, who is that ?", in fact I could see Shirley through the office window shouting down the phone at me although there was a huge time lag, so much so that she may have actually been taking another call to someone else by now.

"Hello Shirley, over" I tentatively shouted, "its me, out here,over"
"Hello, hello, who is that"
"Its me Shirley, over, out the window, over, look I'm waving at you, over"
"Its a bad line, who is this ?"
"Me, its me, look out of the window, its me, over"

Derek my boss had jumped out of the back seat now, standing by the car and was shouting at Shirley and waving, "Its us Shirley, on the car phone, look, over", he didn't really need to say "over" because he wasn't on the phone but he was getting into the swing of things.

Shirley was still struggling to hear me on the phone but she looked out of the window and waved at Derek, still completely unaware that we were using thousands of pounds worth of telephonic equipment and precious waveband that we'd probably nicked from nearby emergency services just to wave at her through the window.

"Say over and out" the Aircall rep told me, this call was obviously going nowhere.
"Over and out Shirley" I said
"No its got to be the last thing you say" informed the Aircall rep
"Shirley, Shirley, can you hear me"
"Who is this, I can't hear you"
"Over and out"

And I put the phone down. Derek sat back in the car and the Aircall rep started to tell him in strings of numbers just how much it would cost to install such incredible equipment in each of our cars so that we could shout at Shirley all day and she couldn't hear us. I don't remember the figures but it was outrageously expensive, so much so that putting a phone in one of the older vans would have increased its worth by 300%.

We all got pagers.