On the Ellen show, she challenged a teenager to fold a map, find something in a phone book and dial a rotary phone. All of it proved to be a challenge for this teenager who seems smart as a whip and runs her own business.
People who grew up with these things probably don’t think about how non-intuitive they are.
I’m sure that teenager would be blazing through the tasks with a few minutes of instruction, but with no instruction, the tasks were not obvious.
Back then the shared service worked like this. They used the normal wires A + B but also used an earth connection. usually a spike or similar into the ground.
Normally now they use just A+B but back then one party connected via A+ earth and the other B+earth which allowed two phone lines using one cable. So to to connect either party had to push a button on their phone to make the connection via A+earth or B+earth depending on which had what. If the other party were using their connection they could still be overheard by the other
Seing that reminds me of when working for BT as a trainee just starting with them and knowing very little the guy I was with and I had to go around changing the coin slots to I think 5p and 10p.
we got to one like that and when opened there were a lot of coins floating around inside. So I asked him about them and what to do.
He said just call the exchange with your area code and name and get the exchange staff to do the same so the they then counted the coins going into the coin box.
So being a bit green I asked why. He said often back then the investigation branch of what was then post office telephones checked up on staff honesty. One of the ways i understood was to “bait” a box you were going to work onto see if you kept the money or not… Anyway that is what I was told
Not one of those trick things they do with apprentices then ? Bit like get me a left handed screw driver 
no not a trick seadly serious. theft is the worst thing ever with BT. One example when the old coinbox wallboards were scrapped (those grey 33-18" ones) they went in the skips. One guy was caught removing from a skip and the IB turned up at his house and he was found ,so the story goes, he was lining out his loft floor with them, he got 6 months prison sentence- lost his job and every benefit he was entitled to on retirement.
You had to be trusted as a lot of times you were in peoples houses
I have to say that occasionally when reading a magazine I get an almost irresistible urge to enlarge a picture by touching it and opening my fingers
When I first came to Australia in the 1960s I worked for a while for the PMG Dept (the equivalent of GPO Telephones at the time) and they thought I was joking when I told them about shared service lines being common. Only in the UK eh?
The GPO and BT kept the UK telecommunications in the dark ages with their old fashioned prescriptive ideas even up to the last decade. or so - I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to get a data only SIM card when I last visited.
