Pranks Adults Play
Fun and games in the telephone exchange in the late 1970s
When I first left school, I decided it was time to get a job and make some money. While at school I had done casual labour at VH Farnsworths, a labour pool company in Auckland. You would simply turn up at 6:30 am and if they had work, they would ask for volunteers for different jobs and first-in would get it. They didn’t guarantee to give you work and you didn’t guarantee to turn up. They were fun days, mostly. I will share some stories of my experiences here sometime in the future.
I had already left home and would split my time between school and making great money for a few days a week, working hard (mostly), doing everything from running along the road with rugby league playing lifters (we emptied rubbish bins) I could be back at school by lunchtime having earned around $100 which was a lot of money in 1974-75, cleaning and painting ships bilges and working as scaffolders labourers, climbing tens of meters up the sides of buildings with nothing more than steel caps and a hardhat.
So I found an advertisement in the NZ Herald and applied for a job with NZ Post as a Linesman. I wanted something permanent, I didn’t see how I could pay my way through university.
I didn’t get the job because I hadn’t done Science in School Certificate. NZPO did see the potential in me, and they offered me a job as a trainee Technical Service Officer. Ironically, I ended up becoming the guy who sent the linesmen out in all weathers, while I sat in the comfort of an office.
I did my 9,000 hours, went to technical training school (where I was one of only 2 people to get 100% in my exams) and became a Class One TSO, with a wonderful education in all aspects of electronics and telecommunications.
We rotated various roles, but most of my time was working in what we called the Test Room. Whenever someone called Telephone Faults on 16 and later 120, we were the people who answered the calls.
I loved the role. We had shift work which I thoroughly enjoyed, giving me the freedom to do lots of things like shopping when other people were working, going to parties and gigs when everyone was already raging, with the added benefit of being able to sleep in the following morning. There were some awesome bands playing at that time and I went to lots of gigs in bars and venues such as the Auckland University Cafe, including Th’ Dudes with their epic song Bliss.
Dave Dobbyn, who was on his way to becoming a global star apparently said that this song was originally a sendup of the Australian drinking culture (which wasn’t that much different to ours in New Zealand) and it was originally called Piss. I guess someone decided that this was not appropriate if they wanted to sell lots of records. But drinking piss or having a piss-up, was common vernacular, being a metaphor for drinking large volumes of beer, which would then have to come out the other end, so to speak. It wasn’t bad language as such, depending on the crowd you hung out with.
One of my favourite shifts was 3 pm-9 pm. Just 6 hours, but we also had to work an 8-hour shift on the weekend to make up our hours. I would go to my local, the Kiwi Tavern, a short motorbike ride from my work in Airedale Street, to catch up with friends and find out where the parties were. It was generally a free for all in those days.
Then there was Hello Sailor, which was a bit gimmicky, but their songs Blue Lady and Gutter Black also became anthems. Dragon was another top band who is famous for songs like April Sun in Cuba, and Are You Old Enough? were frequent performers at my haunts. Not only in my haunts but it seemed like they were everywhere. They were at parties I went to, they had some band practices at my Ponsonby School, and when I was living at 21 Richmond Rd, they were often practising in a house in Brown Street that backed on to ours.
One of the albums that were played to death back then was Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. Wild Horses was a great song for winding down at 2 in the morning somewhere in Ponsonby, solving the world’s problems with the stragglers, who hadn’t gone home yet. Rolling Stone Magazine rated it as one of the top 500 songs of all time, so it is fitting that it also sits in my Spotify Top 500 songs, which is what this Substack is all about.
I learned something from this recording. I have never heard of Nashville Tuning before, where the EADG strings are actually tuned an octave higher than the other 2. Apparently, that’s what Mick Taylor did on this song. There must be special strings for that because I know my ordinary strings would snap well before they got that high. I’d love to try it though. Might have to buy another guitar to try that on.
Some of the people I met in that role became lifelong friends.
I should say, when I mention pranks, we played them on each other as well. I remember the first one that was played on me. As part of my training, I had to spend a few weeks in different roles. One was ironically the linesmen. So on my first day with a gang of linesmen, we had to go to the depot to stock up the truck.
The foreman of the gang told me that it was customary for the new person on the team to get some of the supplies we needed for the day. I had been warned about this one by my mates, so it was double jeopardy. I was sent to get the proverbial skyhook and a long weight (wait) along with some batteries and other bits and pieces. So I went and got the other bits and pieces and then went and had a coffee and a couple of cigarettes. Yes, I smoked back then, everyone did. We even had NZ Post ashtrays in our office, a whole stack of them!
Eventually, I made it back to the team who was starting to get worried that maybe the stores manager had played the prank too long, making me wait forever, not knowing that I was reversing the prank on them. “I got most of the stuff”, I told them, but sorry about the long wait!” That earned me their respect and some laughter. Some of them became friends for several years.
So back to the Test Room at Airedale Telecommunications Centre, we would sit in a room similar to this one.
When people dialled 16, we would sit there with our headsets on and answer something like “Fault Service, how may I help you.” People would then tell us things like “I’ve been trying to call my sister and I have been getting the busy signal for 2 hours. She never talks on the phone that long and I need to talk to her about a family emergency. I think she has left her phone off the hook. Can you put the buzzer on it for me?”
We were able to silently listen in to a line to see if anyone was talking on it or not. If they weren’t and didn’t respond to us, we would put on ‘The Howler’ which would generate a noise that would become steadily louder if the phone was ‘off-the-hook’.
If they were talking, then we would let the caller know that “Yes they are still on the line.” Sometimes we would be asked to interrupt them for an urgent call, but it would have to be life or death and we would have to log it.
But I was talking about pranks. We had a few to choose from and to excuse myself, I was still in my late teens. But that’s not the case for everyone who did these things.
We had a ring button. This was a toggle switch and we could connect to any phone number in our telephone exchanges and create any ring we liked. So normally a phone would ring twice, stop, ring twice and so on. But we could make it go da da da dah, or any sequence we wanted, even just one long ring. We would do that to our friends and then not respond when they answered, or get one of our colleagues to ask them silly questions while we listened in.
There used to be free services that you could ring for a weather forecast and then there was Dial a Prayer. On a quiet evening we would ring a friend and as soon as they answered, connect them to Dial a Prayer. Doing that 3 or 4 times was often good for a laugh.
When the number people had to call for Fault Service was 16, one of the exchanges I looked after was Ponsonby and all phone numbers in Ponsonby started with 76. Often people would slip with their finger when dialling the 7 and accidentally dial 16 as the first 2 numbers instead. When we put our jack plug in the socket (yes we still did that in the 70s), we could hear them dialling the rest of the numbers. We were able to plug another jack into a socket that constantly played the ringing tone. So we were able to make their call ring and then answer with something puerile like “Good evening, this is Underground Airways. How can I help?”
There were many more pranks we played on our friends and sometimes the unsuspecting public. It passed the time on evenings when things were quiet and we were getting bored with reading or playing cards.
Hahaha those were the days. I clearly remember siting alongside Gino on the Test room desks.. 10 of them in a line. From Memory position 1 to 5 was smoking and then from 6 to 10 was non smoking. Like that made a difference, as you would look along the line of us sitting there and you would often see clouds of cigarette smoke rising up as ash trays were filled next to you. There were so many things we got up to that I could not mention as I would imagine that one could get into trouble if exposed !!!! hahaha. But trust me, we had many hilarious moments ,especially during the afternoon shift when we could monitor certain Telephone boxes outside the local pubs as some callers would call us in error instead of their home numbers !!!! The reactions from callers were unbelievable, often saying, Who are you ? !!!! Well say no more !!
Many other stories !!!! All of these things could never happen nowadays .