BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1948

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 19, 12 November 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1948

AT LAST! Following a long, period of weary waiting, Whakatane telephone subscribers are to have the benefit of the new exchange as from tomorrow. Many will expect an immediate and revolutionary change for the better in the service. They will be a little disappointed. Undoubtedly the service will improve, and probably noticeably so, from the outset. But it will be some little time before the advantages are fully apparent.

However, we can now look forward confidently to a lessening of those exasperatingly long waits for connections, those maddeningly futile efforts to get through to the exchange itself in a hurry. We can expect faster, better service. And no-one has more cause to be happy about it than the exchange staff themselves. Now is the appropriate time to say something of what has gone on behind the scenes lately.

Few subscribers understand the difficulty of handling 900 impatient people on an exchange board with a 450-line capacity, and fewer still- appreciate just how hard it is for a harrassed exchange clerk to keep eventempered and obliging under those circumstances.

There have been complaints. Many justified. The BEACON itself has been a sufferer. “Hot” news has missed the press on two or three occasions on account of tardy telephone calls. Inquiries have taken twiceAhe should have taken. Some stories have had to stand the white glare •of public criticism without the authoritative backing they should have had, if only telephone calls had got through smartly. /, All very awkward/ But we have tried to take the reasonable view, realising that the fault has not been altogether a human fault.

It has been easy to criticise. And a lot of the criticism has been levelled a little unfairly at the exchange staff. But anyonewho had seen the old exchange in action recently would realise that, often under-staffed and always overloaded, it was giving the best service its operators could possibly get out of it. Those operators deserve congratulation for their consistent courtesy .under very difficult conditions and for their earnest efforts to give a service with the inadequate means at their disposal. Possibly there have been oc- , casions when the enraged clamourings of impatient subscribers have received something other than the “soft answer that turneth away wrath”, but it must be remembered that telephone operators are just as human as the rest of us, and it is only fair to accord them the courtesy we rightly expect from them.