The cockney accent (London)

 

My exposure to the cockney accent prior to my coming over here to London was passive knowledge.

    I knew that it was an East London accent spoken by “traditionally one born within hearing of Bow Bells” (my computer dictionary tells me), and had heard a bit of it in old black and white British films, but no more than that.

    In my second year in London, I started working at British Monomarks, a telex agency, to see my way through university, as I was self supporting.

    One day, a young colleague with a constantly puckered brow (Cliff Webb [Webber?], late teens or early 20s at the most) said to me across our two machines (facing each other), “Can you pass me some piper.”

    What on earth was “piper”?  

Me:  Pardon???

Cliff:  Piper.

Me:  Say that again.

Cliff:  Piper.

Me:  Sorry?

Cliff:  Piper, piper.

Me:  Can you spell it?

    He gave up in frustration, walked over to the desk by me and grabbed a sheet of paper from the ream on it.

(London, 1978)

The brain works in wondrous ways: 01 (Penny the ex-colleague) (London)

I was out food shopping on Seven Sisters Road one day in the 90s.  

Waiting at the bus stop, I saw an apple fall out of the rucksack of a woman who was standing with her back to me.  

I picked it up and said to the back of her head, “Your apple’s fallen out of your rucksack.”  

She said, even before she turned round to face me, “I know that voice!”  

It was Penny who’d worked at the telex agency, British Monomarks, when I worked there 1978–1981.  

She’d started working there a bit after me, and hadn’t stayed as long (I think) — therefore, we hadn’t known each other that long.

We hadn’t always been on the same shifts — therefore, not that much exposure to each other.  

When our shifts did overlap, we didn’t actually talk much because there was always so much to do — therefore, she hadn’t had that much sampling of my voice.  

That’s going back more than a decade, yet she recognised my voice from that one short sentence uttered behind her back!  

(London, 1978–1981, 1990s)

Thinking outside the box: 01 (London)

(from googling)

Quote

"Thinking outside the box" is an idiom that encourages creative and unconventional problem-solving. It means approaching situations with an open mind and considering solutions beyond the typical or expected. This type of thinking can lead to innovative ideas and solutions.

Unquote

I worked as a part-time telex operator at British Monomarks throughout my first degree at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), being self-supporting, not taking my mother’s money. 

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 outgoing 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 asking for payment; my customer couldn’t prove that the debtor had received the requests / demands.

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 (i.e., they can’t conveniently pretend they never got the item after they’d seen that it was a demand for payment).  Also, my customer had a neutral third-party (the Taiwanese debtor’s own GPO) as witness 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)