TELEPHONIC CHAOS

Southland Times, Issue 18840, 5 June 1920, Page 2

TELEPHONIC CHAOS

NEW YORK’S TROUBLES

BREAK DOWN OF SYSTEM,

The telephone service, once the admuaction of the whole world, and particularly of visitors from London, has fallen grievously from its former state of miraculous efficiency', writes a correspondent from New York. For more than a year past, in fact ever since the Armistice, it has been steadily and rapidly deteriorating, until to-day there is no more despised and abused institution in the world.

Cartoonists daily make the telephone the target of their sneers. One of the most striking of their recent pictures depicts an exasperated New York citizen viciously hurling the telephone receiver through the window.

Only recently a disastrous fire occurred in the metropolis, in which a lady and two children were burned to death, owing to the fact, it is alleged, that nobody was able to give the alarm through the telephone, though several neighbours vainly tried for 20 minutes to connect with the fire brigade. The vice-president of the company, Mr J. S. McCulloch, in view of this catastrophe, has issued a plea for merry to the public. He admits that the service is bad, and cannot promise any real improvement for many months. According to him, the daily average of calls in New York before the war was 2,000,000. This number had increased to 4,000,000 on the first of the present year. Yet all through the war the telephone industry was classified as non-es-sential, with the result that the company was unable to make new extensions to meet the amazing growth of traffic. To add to its difficulties, its staff of operators is short by 3000. The vice-president announces that the company intends to spend during the next 12 months £7,200,000 in establishing new exchanges and to add £400,000 to the amount of its pay-roll , Meanwhile, he makes an urgent appeal, especially to the women of New York, to cease their habit of gossiping endlessly over the telephone, and of monopolising the wires with riffraff conversation. His proposed plan of eliminating useless calls by r instructing each operator to inquire of every customer, “Is your call essential?” has, however, only brought a fresh storm of maledictions upon the company. Leader-writers point out that the suggested inquiries would merely add to the existing confusion and lose time. Whereas before the war about five seconds was the average time consumed in establishing connection over the telephone it now frequently takes 10 minutes, and sometimes much longer, to attract the attention of the operator. New York has been observing with grim interest the complaints of London, and has come to the conclusion that the conditions in England cannot be nne-quarler as exasperating as they are here, where subscribers, though unable to obtain the connections they call, are daily, times without number, rang up by people who angrily shout “wrong number; get off the ’phone.”