TELEPHONES (7 may 2004)
If you are as ancient as I am, you too must sometimes be surprised about the progress of technlogy.
Yesterday I bought a new telephone.
Well actually not just a telephone. I bought four of them, one telephone for almost every room of the house. No sorry, madam, not in the kitchen or the bathroom ...
One problem was that the central telephone had to know there were three friendly phones in the house. And in order to be able to do that, they first had to communicate their existence to the central telephone.
But there a problem arose: as soon as they were connected to the electricity and woke up, the signals of the other telephones seemed to confuse them and they got into a kind of identity crisis, which prevented them from doing anything sensible.
I had to find a way to make them believe they were the only telephone in the house.
The solution was as simple as it was weird: before any telephone awoke, I put all the other telephones in metal containers like the oven, the mailbox and a breadbin ...
It seems odd, but it worked. And I managed to get them to communicate with one another.
So if you now call me, I can answer your call from anywhere in the house. Or I could even connect you to any of the three charming ladies I live with.
