In article ,
west.ender writes

"Annabel Smyth" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 17 May 2004 at 19:02:51, west.ender
m
wrote:


"JAF" wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 17 May 2004 13:00:16 +0100, Tony Walton

wrote:

Choose from their bliddy menu at random.

If you want to sepak to a human, don't make any selections.

Hmmm. Normally that's my tactic too; but I phoned my phone company
recently,
and I was told by The Voice that I would be disconnected if I didn't
make
a
selection!


What happens, I wonder, if you still have an old-fashioned phone that
doesn't have a tone system?

I've often wondered that meself. Where can I get one? I'd love an old
ringing phone with a dially dial, in that old fashioned green colour.

Car boot sale. eBay UK. Specialist retailer. There used to be a
little place in Glasgow, but you paid through the nose; still, you
hope they were fixed. We had a few; we converted Mum and Dad
to having phone sockets through the house instead of one
receiver in a chilly scullery, for some reason (come to think, if
perhaps Reader's Digest in 1965 had a feature "If Your Teenager
Is Always On The Phone - "...), but we never converted them away
from dials, even with a cordless phone. But they're gone now,
so's the house, and I don't think we kept any of the phones.

Belated thought that almost all dial phones were rented and the
legal property of BT anyway, and most likely came onto the
second-hand market through Foul Play.

And, cheaper and more versatile to get a phone in dial-style but
with the dial actually buttons; Index and Argos do them for starters;
Argos has one in mirror silver finish in "1940s style" shape (the
sort we were still getting in the seventies) with black handset for
twenty-five quid, and one in wood (I'm not sure that's authentic, but
it's - different) for forty; Index has one in candlestick style, forty
quid, and a plain white one in conical shape for twenty.

Do remember you can now have a home phone with address
book, e-mail and SMS, digital cordless, downloadable ringtones...
none of the retro phones in the book have more than last-number
redial, and if you're lucky a Recall button.

None of this is particularly on-topic in any of the newsgroups it's
appearing in, except for the bit about phones being owned by BT
and only rented.

Robert Carnegie at home, at large
--
"Are you sure you want to post?" - my software, every time