Russia, January 12, 1998
They Look Like Telephones...
Most days I think a string and two cans would be better than the Russian phone system
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Oh to make a phone call in this country! I spent six tokens on Saturday trying to make one phone call from a public phone. See the phone system here works a little different than in the states. We have public phones (coin & card), private phones (if your lucky), business phones (if your really lucky) and cellular phones (if your a New Russian), but no phone books, operators, or modern phone lines. There are public phones in every metro station, and once every few blocks, that come in two types, coin and card. The coin phones use a little brown plastic coin sold at the metro station for $0.35, but don't think your call is gonna be that cheap. First you pick up the receiver, dial, then when the party answers, you drop in the coin. Now is where the fun begins. If your coin goes in to quickly or slowly or not at all, the phone will hang up. If you drop your coin in at a weird sound on the phone, and not actually when someone picked up, too bad also. See the Russian phones don't have a coin slot, so you cannot get the token back, and there aren't any operators (more on that later) to give you a refund. About 80% of the phones do not work, either there is no dial tone, or they will eat all your tokens. I ran into a few of the latter last Saturday. Now if you actually get through on the coin public phones, you have three minutes to talk before you have to put in another token. Sometimes the phone will warn you, but most of the time, the line just goes dead. Now there are new card phones which are a joint venture with France Telkom, that work on prepaid cards like the French phones. The card phones work all the time, every time, with only the poor Russian phone lines to hold them back. I love the phones, no waste, but they are expensive, $0.35/min and only in the metro stations. Ugh! To get a phone installed in your house, you must have mafia connections or wait up to 10 years for the phone technician. Because of this, if you have a phone, it is cherished, and the phone bill is almost religiously worshiped. I have seen grown women break down and lay sobbing on the floor when told that their phone was going to be turned off because they were late paying the bill. Once you have a phone, you get to deal with the crazy system where you can only make calls of 1/2 hour or less. At exactly 1/2 hour the phone will go dead. Either that was the length of the KGB recording tapes, or the state figured you had talked long enough and it was someone else's turn. Businesses have a hard time finding phone lines in all this mess. It is common to see a business advertise three or four widely scattered phone numbers (for example: 245-9345, 567-4563, & 945-3123) because they were the numbers they could get, unlike the states where it is usual for a company to have a block of lines (for example: 833-5740 to 833-5745). I know that Price Waterhouse, a company with enough money to make anything happen, has only one phone line, but a whole team of operators and a big switching box to keep the line free. The New Russians, tired of all the hassle, usually have cellular phones. They are much easier to install in these countries than any other type of phone, but they are still expensive. Every time I go to a bar or club, there is a crowd of people in the bathroom or just outside the door, screaming into cellulars over the noise. I sometimes think I should get one, then I come to my senses. It is nice being in a country where "I couldn't find a phone," is a solid excuse. The trick, after you find a working phone, is to have a number to call. There are no operators here, and no phone books, so you had better know the number already. There are actually a few business phones books, but they are really large advertisements, only listing paying businesses. Now once you have a phone, and the number, you hit the biggest problem of all, the phone lines themselves. I remember my first day at PW, when I used the phone I was so impressed because it was touch tone instead of pulse. The entire Russian phone system is pulse, so finding a touch tone, and not a rotary (yes, rotary) phone is quite rare. Our touch tone phones must have something to do with the big switching box in the Admin Department. I figure the box converts the touch tones into pulses for the Russian phone system to recognize. There is also a extreme lack of phone lines in this country. Something like 1/5 of the number of lines per person vs. the States. Busy signals are quite common, not became someone is on the phone, but because there isn't an empty line for your call to go on. International calls are especially bad, with all of them going through one switching center here in Moscow. Before 1990, it was customary to go to the post office and place a request to make an international call, and then wait up to three or four hours for a line to be free for you to use. Thank God for AT&T Direct! So now you have a phone, a number, and a line, and your busy chatting away. If you can actually hear your party, feel good. I am used to yelling on the phone now, just so the other person can hear me. Then, without warning, you may hear another call on your line. I have heard the person pick up, dial, talk, and then start chatting with my party as they wait for their party to answer the phone. True party lines! In the end, phones here are a nightmare. Now you know why I email so much. It is the only realistic way to go. |
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i would like to know more about telephones now and how they were used back in 1870 to 2000 and could i please have a quick timeline from yous if that wil be possible.
THANK YOU
Jade Saddlier
Lytton High School
Gisborne
P.S.I would be delighted if you send some images of telephones in 1870 to the year 2004
You are kidding.