Hello! Can you hear me?

I remember a time when communications was not just difficult, it was almost impossible. One fine afternoon I got a call from an Investigative Officer (CID/ DCI). He called our home line. Luckily I picked the call, my grandmother would have fainted knowing "the government is looking for me". The guy casually asked me if I received a cheque recently, I said yes, and he told me to go see him.

That is a story for another day because the cheque happened to have been stolen. Long story short, I was a suspect! He is lucky to have gotten through to me via a fixed line phone. That was around 2001, the mobile phone plague was just starting to spread, however we had one of the most unreliable telephone providers.

The Kenya Post and Telecommunication Corporation (KPTC) was the sole provider. For those too young (or not yet born), it was Posta operating telephones. They operated an "endangered species" of telephones named the "call box" or "phone booth". The booth was red in colour (later turned yellow/green), mostly used for reverse calls, they would occasionally be kicked and set ablaze during riots. I have no "official statistics" but the phone booths were maybe out of service 90% of the time. It was either full of coins on Friday night, staff will empty it early on Monday, say 11.55am or it was just dead.

I remember we used to travel to Lamu from Mombasa in the 90s. When we got there, we need to make a call home to say that we arrived safely, that is where the hunt for coins began, followed by a hunt for a working call box. We would be lucky to find one at the post office, the only one working out of 6. Seventeen guys are seated waiting for reverse calls, others were just seated there waiting to listen in to conversations (maybe to tell their kids as bed time stories, why else would they be listening to other people talk?).

After losing say 20 shillings, the call would go through and our parents would be at ease knowing that we reached at 1pm (and finally managed to call at 8pm to inform them). Some times our home line was not working. KPTC technicians had a habit of asking for tips to repair phone lines not working. Whenever they were broke, they just need a few phone lines not to work and money starts trickling into their pockets. Most times we used to report the line as faulty and leave it at that, if we are lucky, it will work again in a few weeks.

Cables stolen and exchanges vandalised were some of the excuses they always gave. I remember a time when I was at the Kenya Airways office to "confirm" a ticket time for a relative, they had to radio the airport because none of the phones were working for more than 3 months. I remember one fine day in April we went to report our line was faulty, they asked us to wait until February of the following year (It didn't work by Feb!)

There were many stories of phone lines not working, opportunities missed, time wasted, thanks to KPTC. When Safaricom and Kencell (Zain/Airtel) started offering mobile phone services, we stopped relying on the the fixed lines.

If you had a fixed phone line and KPTC was still in charge, here is how you can know if your phone would be working right now. A man was asked to create a sentence using the words GREEN, PINK and YELLOW. He said " The phone rang, green green, I pink up the phone and said yellow!

If you didn't get that joke, your phone (or the nearest call box) would probably not be working right now. If it took you a while to get the joke, that was how long it took for a phone call to get through (if it ever goes through). If there was an award for the worst phone provider, KPTC surely deserves the award.

What was your experience using fixed phones/call boxes?