Operator Story #1 Molly Erueti - Waimana, Bay of Plenty (1968)

Waimana Post Office
It was back in 1968 when I moved from our very small [still small] township of Waimana in the Bay of Plenty to the Big Smoke [Wellington]

We had rostered shifts:
0600 to 12noon
12noon to 6pm
6pm to Midnight
Midnight to 0600 and our Postmaster lived at the back of the Post Office [separated by a wall]

Looking at these photos on Pulse does bring back fond memories.

One that comes to mind – We had this shop owner ring the Exchange 8am every Mon/Wed & Fri and go thru his list of customers [about 25] that he would ring to get their shopping list and have these delivered later that same day.
There were times when you were asked to interrupt a call to clear the line for toll calls.
You had users who would forget that they share the line and would talk for hours
Using morse code I thought was quite unique for party lines, we didn’t have a lot of subscribers on their own lines, majority of them had to share.

For Toll calls – we had to write out a card to the subscriber’s number, make the call, once the call was connected it was then stamped with the date & time and the same was repeated once the call ended.

We had 2 main lines [for tolls] to Whakatane and 2 for Opotiki if the Whakatane lines were both used, we would go thru Opotiki to get to Whakatane.

We were one of the lucky ones, I was still living at home and could walk to work which was just down the road.
Our phone number was 83, lucky for us we didn’t get to share the line. My sister’s phone number was 76M

Yes some good times were had.