Are there any ABers living in Cherry Burton ...

[mrs.chappie]

... which is a village near Beverley in East Yorkshire?

[craft1948]

mrs.c I worked in the York Telephone Area office in the 70's starting when it was Post Office Telephones. One of my more fascinating jobs was actually compiling the telephone directory. I then transferred from BT UK to BT International in an engineering design division and then later to BT Global Services until retirement.

[craft1948]

I have actually played table tennis at the Lowgate exchange against a team of the engineers........

[mrs.chappie]

Thanks craft. I can remember there was observations done on the Hull exchange at York (which was our HQ). Every week we had a "refresher" with a report sent to us from York. If an operator had said summat naughty to a sub, it might crop up in refresher. Did you have any dealings with that? Did you ever have a spell on the switchboards?

[craft1948]

No mrs.c..........I worked on a private switchboard before having my daughter, I joined BT when she was 4......first job was in the telephone accounts office (TAG) and then stints in loads of other departments before joining BTI........I did the telephonists wages for a while though....

[mrs.chappie]

Was that just the York telephonists, or did you do the Hull telephonists too?

[craft1948]

I think I just did York...........so many jobs so long ago......
I compiled directories and Yellow Pages...........I once gave a golf club a gamekeeper instead of a greenkeeper, and put a company under marital aids instead of martial arts.......
I worked as a debt recovery officer for 5 years which was interesting to say the least........
Worked on a computer conversion project on loan in London for a year and on my return transferred to BTI working on an engineering project in Sydney, Australia............great place to work for years and have many happy memories.......

[mrs.chappie]

Good old days, craft. I used to laugh when offering a transfer charge call. If the sub was in a phone box, we were supposed to call it a "call office". Blimey, the state of some of them. And I remember cursing at having to run down to the bottom of the exchange if someone wanted a phone number in Ireland. For certain areas, we only had a couple of sets of directories to share between all the DQ operators.

How times have changed - they now have it all at their fingertips.

You sound like you've had a long and happy working life, craft. I'm pleased to hear that.

[craft1948]

You sound like you did too mrs.c......heard all the stories about the engineers and telephonists ahem!!