We are to have a new ‘non-emergency’ number for getting help with our health – nice & easy to remember, it is 111.
Presumably in these digital electronic fibre optic days there is not much chance of this number being accidentally triggered – though one fears that it will be all too easy for anyone drunk, malicious or feeble minded to dial it just for a laugh or just because they can.
As children we were delighted by daddy’s explanation of why the number couldn’t be 111 – surely you could dial that more quickly than 999? Well yes, but it could also be set off very easily by the birds who were always resting on the lines, tapping away with their beaks. A lot of time would be wasted in false alarms.
When we were older teenagers there was a craze for making free phone calls from public telephone boxes – all you had to do was lift the receiver & tap out the number on the bar underneath it; this somehow bypassed the Press Button A charging mechanism. Our father warned us of the criminal record we would get if we tried it – all the engineers had to do was listen at the Exchange – the clicks were obviously not being made by a dial – AND as they would also know which phone box the sound was coming from, a police car would be round before we had even completed our call. We didn’t believe that bit, but we got the message. And in truth it wasn’t a very accurate dialling method, so all that those who tried it really achieved was a series of nuisance calls to bemused subscribers.
But isn’t it odd how people still talk about dialling a number – does anybody ever get to do this literally any more.
Presumably in these digital electronic fibre optic days there is not much chance of this number being accidentally triggered – though one fears that it will be all too easy for anyone drunk, malicious or feeble minded to dial it just for a laugh or just because they can.
As children we were delighted by daddy’s explanation of why the number couldn’t be 111 – surely you could dial that more quickly than 999? Well yes, but it could also be set off very easily by the birds who were always resting on the lines, tapping away with their beaks. A lot of time would be wasted in false alarms.
When we were older teenagers there was a craze for making free phone calls from public telephone boxes – all you had to do was lift the receiver & tap out the number on the bar underneath it; this somehow bypassed the Press Button A charging mechanism. Our father warned us of the criminal record we would get if we tried it – all the engineers had to do was listen at the Exchange – the clicks were obviously not being made by a dial – AND as they would also know which phone box the sound was coming from, a police car would be round before we had even completed our call. We didn’t believe that bit, but we got the message. And in truth it wasn’t a very accurate dialling method, so all that those who tried it really achieved was a series of nuisance calls to bemused subscribers.
But isn’t it odd how people still talk about dialling a number – does anybody ever get to do this literally any more.
