HE HAD TO WAIT!

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23219, 3 April 1950, Page 9

HE HAD TO WAIT!

One of the best stories to come out of die cut-over of New Plymouth’s telephone service from manual to automatic concerns a technician who was among those detailed to take around new instruction cards to the street call boxes. I his was done shortly after G o’clock. When the technician arrived at a box in the centre of the city he found a queue waiting, For a while he stood in the queue, holding the bag of tools which he needed to make the final adjustments. Then, as the queue showed no sighs of diminishing and remembering tiie strict timetable of the cut-over, he waited until the woman in the box left, left the queue and headed toward the door. He was promptly intercepted by an irate woman. Queues, she informed him, were queues, no matter who he was. He was unable to pacify her. and finally, quailing before the onslaught, lie went back into the queue. There he waited patiently until it became his turn to enter the box.