TELEPHONE NUMBERS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30531, 28 August 1964, Page 10

TELEPHONE NUMBERS

Change-over Tonight

The 37,500 telephone subscribers who have found that they have new numbers in the new telephone books will have to start remembering them from 11 p.m. today. At that time the Post Office will cut in its new exchanges at Linwood and Hillmorten and the replacement exchange at Belfast. Both the new telephone directories and the new 111 emergency service will then come into operation. The new service will be initiated by the PostmasterGeneral (Mr Scott) at a ceremony at the new Hillmorten exchange. It will be. attended by the Mayor of Christchurch (Mr G. Manning) and the Post Office’s regional engineer in Christchurch (Mr H. W. Wilkinson). Mr Wilkinson thinks some interruption to the usual service will be unavoidable at the time of the cut-over, and he appeals to subscribers to avoid making calls between 10.55 p.m. and 11.20 p.m. One important change after 11 p.m. will be the access numbers to satellite exchanges. Subscribers are advised by the Post Office to check them in the front of the book before making calls to those areas. In the new book most’ subscribers have six-figure numbers instead of the old fivefigure numbers. This gives the Post Office room to expand its service to 600,000 subscribers.

Since the new books were distributed, business firms and individuals have been laboriously working through their lists of friends, clients and associates bringing their telephone numbers up-to-date. For some this is a formidable task. Inevitably some will continue to use out-dated numbers and to give their own old numbers to others by mistake. To avoid disappointment and confusion, advertising clients of “The Press” are urged to make quite sure that the number they use in an advertisement is the new one and not the old one. Care in this respect will help overcome congestion at the complaint and information services of the telephone exchange.