Thinking outside the box: 01 (London)

I worked as a part-time telex operator at British Monomarks throughout my first degree at SOAS. 

Small companies didn’t have enough business to justify installing their own telex machine (too expensive if they only needed to send the occasional telex), so they’d open an account with British Monomarks for a small subscription fee. Then they’d pay for however many telexes they sent/received — could be once/year (just exaggerating to illustrate the point). 

Customers would phone in and dictate their messages.

One day, I took a call from a customer who had been trying to get the other party (in Taiwan, as it happened) to settle a debt, with no success — the debtor never responded to their letters, my customer couldn’t prove that the debtor had received the letters.

Customer said he wanted to send a telex this time because our machine would show that the connection had been successful.

The procedure:  

1.  We’d dial the recipient’s number.

2.  Once we got through, their machine ident would automatically come up — this is called the answer back.

3.  At the end of the transmission, we always asked for the ident again (just in case the line had got disconnected during the transmission, which did happen every now and then). There’s a key on the telex machine for getting the answer back.

So we’d have their machine ident at the start of the message printout, then again at the end — double confirmation that the transmission had gone through successfully.

Customer said he wasn’t sure if it’d work as the debtor could still claim it never arrived. So how to proceed, he asked, he couldn’t think of anything else.

I suggested we send a telex to them via the Taiwan GPO [General Post Office] instead, for the GPO to deliver by hand — like the old-fashioned telegram/cable, whereby the postman would hand over the telegram/cable and the recipient would have to sign receipt for it.  One has to sign receipt for a post office delivery first without getting a chance to read the contents.  Also, my customer had a neutral third-party witness (their GPO) if he had to take them to court. 

A few weeks later, the manager John Haste read out, and pinned up on the notice board, a letter from the customer saying my plan had worked and the debtor had settled, thanking me (by name) for solving the conundrum which had been plaguing him for quite a while.

(I was 25 at the time.)

(London, 1979)