Unacceptable Solution: Press Zero and Hang Up

Metropolitan Los Angeles would be impossible without both the telephone and the automobile. These two inventions, in fact, can be said to have created the city in its present dimensions.

Without either, life as we know it would simply collapse. Without the automobile, we would be restricted to our neighborhoods, unable to reach distant jobs, markets, entertainments, relatives and friends. Can you imagine what our streets would look like if each of us drove a horse and buggy?

Without the telephone we would even be unable to communicate with distant objectives, much less reach them bodily. I am reminded of the conclusion of a committee appointed by the British Parliament to study the feasibility of the telephone after it had been introduced in New York. “We have no need of the telephone. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

To replace the telephone in Los Angeles today, it would take at least 20 million messenger boys, on motorcycles, both to carry the messages and return the answers. Can you imagine the streets with 20 million motorcycles dashing this way and that? And they couldn’t even begin to pick up today’s telephone traffic.

These blessings are not, however, without their price. Automobiles create smog, get in one another’s way and kill thousands of us every year. The telephone has been a relatively benign invention, on the other hand, but of late it has shown a darker side.

About half our calls are wrong numbers; but that is a small price to pay for the convenience. Less excusable are the calls we get, usually about dinner time, asking us if our house needs a new exterior, a new roof or a termite inspection, or whether we want to sell it.

I try never to be rude to such callers, since I know people whose livelihood depends on that kind of business. But I rebelled, some time ago, when I got a tape-recorded pitch from a real-estate man. There wasn’t even a live person at the other end. I haven’t had that kind of impersonal contact since. It seems to have been rejected by the long-suffering public.

But now there’s a new one. Don Smith of Santa Ana writes that his phone rang at about 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday and a computerized male voice said, “You have a collect phone call from . . .” At that point a high-pitched voice interpolated an unintelligible name. Then the male voice resumed: “If you will accept the call, press 1; if not, press zero and hang up.”

Smith almost panicked. His first thought was that one of his children was in trouble. Then he realized that all were accounted for. He had no idea who had placed the call. He pressed zero and hung up.

But the next morning he phoned Pacific Bell to ask for an explanation. They said the call had not been placed through them, because they do not accept that kind of business “at the present time.” However, they said, some other companies do.

They said that if Smith had pressed 1, taken the call, and then hung up, they could have found out who had placed it. As it was, they could only guess.

Smith feels crowded: “If you don’t understand the name of the person placing the call you don’t have a chance to ask them to repeat it. Actually, it’s about like talking to a wall. . . .”

If we are all soon to be subjected to collect calls from persons whose names we can’t understand, and whom we can’t question, I’m for calling in those messenger boys.

Meanwhile, it seems that the bigger things get the more they lose their charm. My friend Lu Haas says he looked up a mutual friend in his personal number book the other day and was puzzled to find a five-digit number preceded by FL. It took him a moment to realize that the FL stood for Fleetwood (he thinks) and was years old.

“And then it further dawned on me that all those old prefixes had gone down the drain and there was no museum around preserving them. . . .”

Jim Christopherson of El Centro also writes nostalgically of the old lettered prefixes. “Mine was FI--for Fireside. There was a number you could remember. . . .” He said some seniors can remember their old prefix numbers, but not their new ones.

Mine was CApitol.