Red Light Call

These pretty little baubles are not in fact snooker balls (although they may look like them), they are lights embedded in the wall of my office. They were used to alert people to the fact they had a phone call.

Back in the day when an office would have only one phone you would be allocated a combination of lights and if they lit up someone would come and find you and tell you that you should go to the phone. If you were really important you got to have a single colour of light - who is now imagining their senior bosses debating about who gets to be what colour :)

Phones used to be a lot more demanding, you had to memorise numbers or write them down, you had to run to the phone when it rang, you had to check on it regularly to see if you missed calls and you had to sit with all the time you wanted to use it. I think this may be why people used to have children younger after dealing with the demands of a phone kids probably weren't so daunting ;)