PARIS TELEPHONE SERVICE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 438, 24 September 1908, Page 4

PARIS TELEPHONE SERVICE.

Everybody is agreed that the Paris telephone service is about as bad as could be (says the Paris Daily Mail). Formerly after ten or fifteen minutes’ fruitless ringing an angry subscriber insisted on making telephonic complaint to the supervisor at headquarters and had his communication promptly established. Now a peremptory request for the supervisor meets me with an irritating laugh from the telephone girl, and the subscriber is left to nurse his wrath for half an hour or more as a punishment for being impatient. A day or two ago the “ Figaro ” discovered that M. Simyan, Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs, had a telephone at his residence, and it advised all dissatisfied with the service to ring him up and complain. The number was 52,559. The result of this advice has been extraordinary. Hundreds of angry subscribers called up the Undersecretary, and the telephone girls, unable to distinguish between them and his friends, were overwhelmed. The first dissatisfied subscriber started to ring up M. Simyan at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, and the Undersecretary himself unsuspectingly answered the call, as he had not yet read the Figaro. The calls continued all day, and it is estimated that between seven o’clock on Tuesday morning and n on Wednesday night, 1300 calls were registered.