Open drawers: One of my supervisors had a thing about leaving file cabinet drawers open. She insisted that we close them immediately so that no one could walk into them - or trip over a bottom drawer. (Sometimes we DID have to carry big boxes that obscured our vision…)
Side story: The file cabinets had interlocks that only allowed one drawer to be open at a time. One day an interlock failed. When two drawers were pulled out the cabinet tipped over and we heard the CRASH all over the building. Fortunately no one was hurt.
I was a college freshman in '83, with a girlfriend who lived 200 miles away (in the same state, but far enough that it was a long-distance call) – we’d call each other at 6:30am, to take advantage of the low overnight rates.
My brother had one in the '70s up until the wire antenna he strung across the yard attracted a lightning bolt which blew out our mother’s oven thermostat and electric skillet.
I recall helping an Australian girl phone her mother from London.
We went into the old fashioned post office, all marble floors and a row of tellers windows in dark wood, each with a queue. When we eventually spoke to the clerk, my friend had to fill in a form with details of who she wanted to call and for how long - it was very expensive for a three-minute call and she had to pay in advance.
We were given a ticket and told to wait. After 20 minutes or so her name was called and she was sent to a booth with a phone in it. The line was poor and there was a bit of shouting, then she got a few seconds warning before being cut off mid-sentence.
I remember when I was in college there was only one phone (payphone, of course) on the floor. If someone tried to call you someone (usually in the room nearest the phone) would have to get you.
My freshman and sophomore years, there were two (non-pay) phones on each floor. Local only, I think you could probably reach an operator to make a collect call.
You had the option of a phone in your room (became standard junior year) - I remember as a freshman one person on the floor had a room phone. His roommate wouldn’t pay half, so he put a lock on the dial so he couldn’t make calls.
I’m pretty sure our son doesn’t fully realize how lucky he is that long distance rates are a thing of the past. We’re in the DC area, and his girlfriend is in the Finger Lakes area. Their first year together they were in school except during the summer, when they each spent time at each other’s houses. They were apart a lot more than they wanted once the pandemic hit. Talking every night wouldn’t have happened in the old days.
Were gun racks on cars actually a legitimate thing? That just screams BREAK INTO MY CAR AND MAKE AT LEAST $100. When were drug addicts invented? I remember my parents car getting broken into in the early 80s because somebody REALLY wanted the Mets hat on the front seat.
When I was in the Air Force in 1978, somebody in our dormitory discovered that the utility closet contained a phone exchange with open lines. Somebody dug up a utility worker’s phone and plugged it into the outlet and everybody was able to call anywhere in the world for free before somebody figured it out and cut the line.
In the early 1980s I lived in Panama City Panama. That was exactly the set-up in what had been the old Canal Zone that had then-recently reverted to Panama’s national control. You went to an imposing bank-like building in what passed for the “downtown” of the Pacific end of the Zone. It housed the local branch office of the national telephone company / ministry.
The US military had their own separate systems for phoning the States for official business. Which got a certain amount of abuse with unofficial calls, but not much.
Interesting. I wasn’t in Panama from 1980-1988. But in 1979, before the Zone reverted, I was able to call the US even from isolated Barro Colorado Island where I lived. However, IIRC you had to call the operator to make the arrangement, then they would call you back. But this was technically a US government facility so that may have been why we could do this. (Incidentally, my girlfriend at the time worked for the Canal Zone phone company.)
By the time I returned to Panama in 1988 I don’t recall there was a problem calling the US from residences in the former Canal Zone.
For certain. My girlfriend and I talked maybe once a week, but sent each other letters every couple of days. I knew several guys in my dorm whose girlfriends lived elsewhere, and who called them regularly for the first month or so of school – and were then stunned when Wisconsin Telephone sent them $300 phone bills (which, in 1983, was serious money).
And those writing to relatives or friends overseas often used something called an aerogram, a thin sheet of (blue, as I remember) paper with gummed tabs. After writing the letter, you folded along the lines and sealed the tabs to make it into a one-sheet letter/envelope. Postage was prepaid when you bought the aerogram at the post office.
I suspect I was there right in the window where CZ was no longer just one big US government installation and the distinction between personal and official was pretty fuzzy.
But at the same time the Panamanians were still integrating aspects of the territory and services into their larger outside-the-CZ infrastructure. Soon enough all of international telecoms would be modernized with direct international dialing and all the rest.
It certainly felt like right after the treaty was signed, the US Government had really put the brakes on maintenance of anything they intended to turn over. And any significant updates were right out. Since what they intended to turn over was “everything”, with the only difference being what was handing over when, a lot of US-controlled stuff was getting pretty raggedy. Which of course meant when any given item did cede to Panamanian control, they’d be handed a bucket of obsolete rusting jungle-overgrown whatever. Which didn’t help them bring it into their world even a little bit.
Right. A case in point was the Panama Railroad across the isthmus. I used to use it all the time, and it ran like clockwork. By the late 1980s service was very erratic, and stopped entirely a few years later. In 1998 it was purchased by the Kansas City Southern and rehabilitated, but is far more expensive than it once was. A round trip is now $25; in 1979 it was about $1.50. (My Zonian girlfriend knew one of the engineers, and once he allowed us to ride in the cabin into town. I got to blow the whistle at a crossing. )
The Panamanians managed to integrate much of the CZ infrastructure fairly well, especially on the Pacific side, although it took time. However, much of the housing on the Atlantic side deteriorated and is now gone. They tried to distribute housing to poor people, which was a great idea but they weren’t able to pay even basic maintenance and these areas became slums and were eventually torn down.
One of my uncles and his wife lived in South Africa from 1971 to 1977, and their mail was stamped “air mail” and came on a special letter paper which was very thin and almost transparent. It was very exotic for a kid like me.
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