Spark's “to be, or not to be” question

Source: CartoonStock

Way back in the dark ages of the 1970s, long before the thought of becoming a journalist crossed my mind, I was a telephone technician with the old New Zealand Post Office.

(They do say if you remember the '70s, you weren't there, but those of us who worked needed to be sober on the job.)

The Wellesley Street exchange in Auckland where I was based was long-since converted into shops and restaurants and the then-government-owned phone service has evolved into the NZX-listed retailer, Spark, and lines company Chorus.

But back in the 1970s, the building housed three exchanges, an old rotary exchange installed in about the 1900s, a manual exchange, which employed an army of mostly women as operators, and a step-by-step exchange full of British-made switching gear installed in the 1950s.