Please don’t accuse me of going deaf. I am, but it ain’t nearly that bad. But, have you noticed how increasingly, one cannot hear any more, with some telephone calls? The voice at the other end is muffled and distant. Furthermore, everyone’s moaning about it and not just me.

Contrary to popular belief I’m no Luddite. All technology amazes me. To simply push a button on my desk and immediately there’s my Sydney office coming over crystal clear, is a miracle. Except the buggers aren’t always there any more.

Recently, all was revealed.

News broke of a hullabaloo from France after endless complaints, the Telecom mob there admitted they had given up on land line maintenance.  It’s no longer economic, they said, because everyone’s now using cell-phones. Well I’m not, and nor evidently are many others.

Plainly, the same situation applies here. I have a large house which I had built exactly 40 years ago. For about 38 years I’ve had no trouble with the absolutely necessary, four downstairs and two upstairs telephone units. Additionally, I had an answering machine and fax which worked. Sadly, no longer.

Telecom contract out repairs but I smell a rat. After I complained, an ape turned up, wandered about a bit, mumbled he didn’t know what was wrong, buggered off and sent me a bill for $100.

So now I’m down to one phone upstairs and one at the extreme end of downstairs, in my library, which still works loud and clear. God knows, I’ve bought heaps of different units but to no avail and have long since forgotten the magic days of having an answer phone and home fax
machine. So this is progress?

It’s fairly clear that Telecom has given up on landlines and abandoned servicing them.

A month ago, while in Auckland, my staff insisted I come in at 4?pm the next day for a surprise, I did. In bowled up a top Telecom executive and presented me with, what my staff insisted, was the absolute top of the range latest cell-phone. Apparently it would even cook me breakfast. “All free”, I was told – a gift from Telecom, so I would change my ways.

But it sits unused in a drawer. I don’t know how to work it and don’t wish to.

I don’t want to carry a telephone around with me. My life is well organised. All I want is what I had in say, 1975, namely telephones at my home and my office, which actually work. But apparently I can’t.

I’m feeling a bit Hitlerish about all of this. Six months with absolute control and out would come the machine guns to mow over these cell-phone addicts and restore some sanity. In fact I’d make Hitler look like a piker.

Mind you, it would be a bloody busy six months if that was all I had. Like the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner, “I’ve got a little list – and none of ‘em would be missed”, except of course my list is not little, but instead lengthy.

Rat-a-tat-tat, over would go the dazed eyed fat girls streaming out of government offices with sunglasses on top of their heads even though it’s raining; rat-a-tat-tat as I blasted out the shuffling parking meter zombies. I’d get a chauffeur so I could hang out the car window and take out the fresh-from-India, Wellington taxi-drivers clogging the city streets with their top speed of 15kph.

 But pecking order-wise they would all have to wait until the Telecom bosses were first seen to.

But here’s an interesting thing.

The Douglas revolution saw the old Post Office split into two main companies: one, Telecom, to confine itself to telephones, while the Post Office carried on with the mail.

Worldwide, traditional telephony and mail delivery are both taking a beating from the new technology. So answer this?

Why, if Telecom has given up servicing land lines when it’s still charging at least a million subscribers for this ever-diminishing service, is NZ Post able, despite hugely reduced mail usage, to provide what I’ve
always considered to be the best service in New Zealand?

My office can drop letters into the Wellington mail boxes at 5:30?pm and they’re delivered anywhere in the country the next morning. It is a truly remarkable organisation; number one in this country in my view. 

Furthermore, it’s unique in another way. Those of you who still actually read the news will be aware of the current griping in Britain, France and the USA about their fast declining postal services.

The Australians have never matched New Zealand, at least not in the 36 years I’ve had a home and office there.

Maybe we should reunite Telecom back with the Post Office but with one proviso. That is that the new entity’s management be drawn solely from the Post Office personnel.

Telecom’s lot should be re-employed as parking meter wardens to match their competence level. Just don’t let them drive taxis. They’d be even slower than the Indians.