Secret Calls Reveal More Than Sexy Small Talk
The Phone Was The Key To Pandora’s Box (Part One)
Way back in the nineties, the UK Government decided to de-regulate the telephone industry, allowing just about anybody to provide telephone services. With immediate effect, this forced British Telecom to improve its service in order to fend off the expected sudden influx of competition.
The most beneficial addition to what BT offered was what is called itemised billing. Previously all their customers ever got was a single page showing the total amount to be paid. With itemised billing customers could now see who they had called and how long they had spent on each and every call. A one-page bill went to as many as a dozen or more, depending on your usage.
The first pages of listed calls were for regional and national calls. After that came international calls followed by mobile phone calls. Back in those days I was a lot younger and had an excellent memory for all of the numbers that I habitually called, including any international numbers. The one that was totally alien to me was mobile phone numbers due to the fact that the mobile phone industry was still in its infancy and I didn’t actually know anybody with a mobile phone.
As a rule, our monthly telephone bills in those days were around about fifty or…
