Socks !

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Rwy in Sight
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Re: Socks !

#61 Post by Rwy in Sight » Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:02 pm

RiS's sister and I love M&S socks. When we lived with RiS senior I used to allocate myself her socks. She become so fed up with that she threaten me with a 5 € fine every time I was caught using her socks. I was off to buy a good supply of my own.

Just hang them in the breeze OFSO.

A good PhD on physics is where socks go when they are washed.

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Re: Socks !

#62 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:48 pm

Rwy in Sight wrote:
Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:02 pm

A good PhD on physics is where socks go when they are washed.
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Your destination remains
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Re: Socks !

#63 Post by ExSp33db1rd » Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:48 pm

You mean you don't your mobile phone number? If so how recherché of you?
What law says one must have a mobile phone ? Mrs. ExS has a Smarthpone thing, doesn't know how to use half the services available, doesn't care, no Apps. often can't remember the number. I have an old NotSoSmart phone, incoming texts only arrive with one quiet "ding" that I never hear so often pick up messages days later if forget to check, and the incoming ringtone is so quiet that I often miss that too. No way of increasing the volume, or changing the chant, event the distributor admitted that I am stuck with what Alcatel set as a "factory defaut" and was unable to change anything when I visited a local depot. Even quiet, I still put it on silent occasionally, e.g. in Committee meetings or the cinema,and find it still on silent days later.

Just seen a text I got yesterday - see how up to date I am ! but no signature, don't recognise the number so no idea who it is from - don't people sign messages anymore ?

If it was essential to have a Telephone Directory for landlines, why not mobiles, would need to be on a World Wide list on The Web. I guess, but why not, I'm sure the technology exists to make it possible ? Was recently delivered the local Phone Book, but no White Pages now, even for existing landlines. Yellow Pages for businesses, so I can still find the number for the local plumber, but for how long.

A curse on the lot of them (mobile phones, that is, not plumbers - Oh ! wait a minute ! )

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Re: Socks !

#64 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jan 30, 2020 12:51 am

ExSp33db1rd wrote:
Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:48 pm
You mean you don't your mobile phone number? If so how recherché of you?
What law says one must have a mobile phone ?
A curse on the lot of them (mobile phones, that is, not plumbers - Oh ! wait a minute ! )
Not one, and I still remember our land line number incalculated into me by mom when I was a kid, lest I was kidnapped on my way to school when I was six.

I enjoy your insouciance and can only hope that I have your sang froid and joie de vivre with matters technical like this when I am 59 (I am now 58). One of my fellow directors in the small company I work for (partially own) was born in 1977 and laughs at my foibles and denial of, so called modern necessities.

I will show em... :-bd
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You must have somewhere
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Your destination remains
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Re: Socks !

#65 Post by ExSp33db1rd » Thu Jan 30, 2020 8:06 am

........lest I was kidnapped on my way to school when I was six...........
Did your Mom think that the kidnappers would let you use a phone to call for help, or was it to let them know who to call with their ransom demands ? What were you worth ?

My parents got their first telephone installed at home after my 21st birthday, when I had left home and joined the RAF. Prior to that, to meet my friends I would walk around to their house and ask if Xxxx could come out and play ? Not only social intercourse but a bit of exercise as well, added to the exercise we got walking to and from school and rolling marbles in the gutter as we did. Mum's Taxi - Volvo SUV's with statuatory black labrador gazing out of the back - hadn't been invented, and no TV so no danger of being glued to a screen all day. To ring my girl friend I would walk to the nearest red telephone box and jiggle two pennies at the inevitable occupant in the hope of getting them to vacate. ( Two pennies ? we DREAMED of having two pennies ! )

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Re: Socks !

#66 Post by Slasher » Thu Jan 30, 2020 8:29 am

Question I asked my folks when I was 7-ish (we was po’): What’s a home telephone?

At 10: what’s an international operator-connected person to person trunk call?

My son at age 6: What was a home telephone?

At 9: what was an international operator?

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Re: Socks !

#67 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:00 am

DTMF, Touch Tone, Push Button phones have been spreading around the world since their invention in 1963.

They are now ubiquitous.

So when we make a phone call, why do we still say we are 'dialling' the number?
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Re: Socks !

#68 Post by Capetonian » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:14 am

Not sure how we've gone from socks to telephones, but we have, so ...

Ian and GG will remember the infamous 'long tickey' that we used in ZA to make free calls from phone boxes, also known as tickey boxes. A 'tickey' was a small coin, a 5c. A long tickey was one of these soldered to a fine wire. When you made your call you let it drop just far enough down to trigger the mechanism into thinking you'd paid, then you pulled it up and repeated the process.

There was a famous phone box in the foyer of the Heerengracht Hotel on the Foreshore in CPT from which you could make free calls another way, by forcing the dial back anti-clockwise after dialling each digit, instead of letting it return at its own speed. There was quite an art to this, which those of us who had family and friends overseas acquired through necessity, since international calls in those days were horrendously expensive. A ten minute call overseas would cost a week's salary!

More sophisticated was a little device that generated the DTMF tones which would sometimes allow free calls.

Just to reestablish a link with the original topic here, I would add that we tended not to spend too long even on free calls as the phone boxes used to stink of a combination of sweat, urine, and socks. It was always nice to get out into the fresh air.

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Re: Socks !

#69 Post by Woody » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:28 am

Back off topic, but did anyone else have a landline that they shared with the next door neighbours :D
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Re: Socks !

#70 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:38 am

Woody wrote:
Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:28 am
Back off topic, but did anyone else have a landline that they shared with the next door neighbours :D
A 'party line' it was called.
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Re: Socks !

#71 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:47 am

Capetonian wrote:
Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:14 am
Not sure how we've gone from socks to telephones, but we have, so ...

Ian and GG will remember the infamous 'long tickey' that we used in ZA to make free calls from phone boxes, also known as tickey boxes. A 'tickey' was a small coin, a 5c. A long tickey was one of these soldered to a fine wire. When you made your call you let it drop just far enough down to trigger the mechanism into thinking you'd paid, then you pulled it up and repeated the process.

There was a famous phone box in the foyer of the Heerengracht Hotel on the Foreshore in CPT from which you could make free calls another way, by forcing the dial back anti-clockwise after dialling each digit, instead of letting it return at its own speed. There was quite an art to this, which those of us who had family and friends overseas acquired through necessity, since international calls in those days were horrendously expensive. A ten minute call overseas would cost a week's salary!

More sophisticated was a little device that generated the DTMF tones which would sometimes allow free calls.

Just to reestablish a link with the original topic here, I would add that we tended not to spend too long even on free calls as the phone boxes used to stink of a combination of sweat, urine, and socks. It was always nice to get out into the fresh air.
I was confused by the 'Ticky', eventually I was told it had been the old silver 3d piece, rather like in the UK a 6d piece was a 'Tanner'.

It had been the normal coin for a call box, that in turn became known as a 'Ticky Box' a name that lasted many years after the introduction of decimal currency, and the demise of the Ticky.

With the old pulse phones, one could 'tap out' numbers on the receiver rest. Obviously it was easier to tap out 2's and 3's than 8's and 9's.
I remember that the local Taxi close to RAF Lindholme had a nice number like 232, and was easily tapped out on the phone in the NAAFI foyer.
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Re: Socks !

#72 Post by Mrs Ex-Ascot » Thu Jan 30, 2020 12:21 pm

Woody wrote:
Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:28 am
Back off topic, but did anyone else have a landline that they shared with the next door neighbours :D
We had a party line with friends just up the road in the early 70's; it was great fun as everyone knew everyone so you could pick up the phone and join in the conversation. It was a bugger when They were talking at length to someone boring when you really wanted to talk to someone else.

Fortunately the phone line belonged to my parents so we could tell them to b***er orf the line. :ymdevil:
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Re: Socks !

#73 Post by Capetonian » Thu Jan 30, 2020 12:27 pm

In ZA they were called farm lines. The operator would put the call through and if it was for you, it would 2 long rings for example, the other farm might be a long and a short.

I once lived briefly in a small village in Wales and the telephone operator's office/switchboard was in a room over the village store. She surveyed all who came and went along the single street. I would sometimes get back to my cottage and within minutes the phone would ring and the operator would say : "Your mother phoned at 3 o'clock and your girlfriend Jane phoned at 4 o'clock ......" It got a bit tricky when she started telling callers what I was up to, where I'd gone and with whom. Luckily the exchange was only open during business hours.

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Re: Socks !

#74 Post by Pontius Navigator » Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:19 pm

ian16th wrote:
Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:00 am
So when we make a phone call, why do we still say we are 'dialling' the number?
For a time I used to Beta test French made Philips cordless telephones. As well as testing these telephones I also had to test the instructions.

I still remember 'place yourself by the telephone and press the buttons on the keypad . . . '. Dialling was so much easier.

Aren't we lucky that Hoover cornered the vacuum cleaner market before Dyson. 'After my wife Dysonned down stairs I continued Dysonning upstairs.'

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Re: Socks !

#75 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:23 pm

Pontius Navigator wrote:
Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:19 pm
Aren't we lucky that Hoover cornered the vacuum cleaner market before Dyson. 'After my wife Dysonned down stairs I continued Dysonning upstairs.'
Hoovering is a British thing, rather like in the UK, all ballpoint pens are 'Biro's'.
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Re: Socks !

#76 Post by Capetonian » Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:37 pm

... and in ZA, all dogs are called Voetsak and there is only one make of icecream, called Roomy's, and all felt markers are called neons or cokies.
(Sorry, only Ian and maybe some others will understand!)

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Re: Socks !

#77 Post by llondel » Thu Jan 30, 2020 3:27 pm

TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:48 pm
IgNobel.JPG
https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/winners/
I seem to remember from his biography that Douglas Bader discovered that he could get around if he put his socks over his shoes in slippery weather.

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Re: Socks !

#78 Post by G-CPTN » Thu Jan 30, 2020 5:31 pm

We moved into a new-build house in 1955 - with a party-line telephone (we didn't have a telephone before that - telegrams were how we received bad news - delivered by a youth riding a BSA Bantam motorcycle).

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Re: Socks !

#79 Post by OFSO » Thu Jan 30, 2020 7:07 pm

We dreamed of having bad news delivered when I were a child. We had to get up at 3 a.m and go and fetch it from the post office.

Socks, now: that was different.

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Re: Socks !

#80 Post by ExSp33db1rd » Thu Jan 30, 2020 10:14 pm

........delivered by a youth riding a BSA Bantam motorcycle
I had one of those, tho' I never "delivered". Recently, here in NZ, aged 80+ I took the motor bike to pick up a pre-ordered Pizza. As I loaded it into the box on the back of my bike, a neighbour waiting in line said " Cor ! are you forced to do that now? " ( Pizza deliveries!)

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