Do we all have, in our heads, the sound of our father or mother answering the telephone, very clearly, sometime in the mid-20th century?
I do. My father would announce the name of our local telephone exchange followed by the familiar four digits, with a slight upturn as he spoke the final digit – the cue for the person at the other end of the line to declare who he or she was.
That was the way telephoneanswering was done. You didn’t just pick up the
