I only ever answered one phone call in the 20 years my parents ran the Post Office in Carrick. I ran into the switchboard, connected and yelled “Do you not know what day it is?” and unplugged. In my defence it was Christmas Day and I felt my parents deserved at least one day off, one day without the constant ringing interruption.
Back then, the phone exchange was still analog and the main switchboard, which was situated in our front room, looked exactly like you might remember from an old black and white movie. It resembled an ‘upright piano’ which played just one song. It hosted a panel of black metal flaps, each hiding a number behind it, like some old game show. Each resident of Carrick, who was lucky enough to have a phone back then, was represented on this panel. The numbers were allocated in numerical order. The Post Office was Carrick 1, the Garda barracks was Carrick 2, my grandfather JW, being the first resident to have a phone was Carrick 3, and so on. The old black phone handsets hand handles which you wound hard to dial the exchange.

When a call came through, one of the many metal flaps fell to indicate which number was calling, the operator, usually my mother plugged a cable into that number, asked where they wanted to call, then connected it to the appropriate destination. A local call went directly to that number, all other connections had to go through the switch in Donegal Town to be forwarded on. It all looked quite complex to me so I avoided it. I’d usually help my father on the Post Office counter, selling stamps to young lovers and doling out pensions to old codgers.
The corner house was a busy hub back then with people coming and going all day. The day started early with the postmen sorting the mail in readiness for delivery. It ended with the daily balance, ensuring all stamps sold and pensions doled were accounted for. These were the days before computers and all work was carried out by my Dad on a Sharp electronic calculator which spat out total on a paper roll. My parents employed a number of people during those years, including Sarah Hegarty and Nora Byrne who both manned the switchboard to great effect. The postmen, John Doherty, Seamus McHugh and Andy were very much part of the office family who spent much of their day around our home. I played little part there and moved to college in Letterkenny in 1980, my disconnection from home had begun and I never properly lived back in Carrick after that time.
On my first day working with Donegal VEC in 1986, I was introduced to the large IBM mini-frame System/36. The computer was the size of a small dining table, it had all of 2mb of ram, a 40mb hard disk and swallowed 8” floppy disks on backups. That may sound like a technical beast but it had the processing power equivalent to the annoying device that plays music when you open a birthday card from an even more annoying friend.
I knew little about computers, I hadn’t even played Space Invaders in Gerry Kennedy’s chip shop when we were young, but that didn’t stop my employer sending me off to be trained and within a few short weeks I became the computer guy in our office. I very quickly became the ‘one-eyed King’.
The IBM, which cost more than my first home, was purchased to run our Payroll and Finance systems. Although the phone in my pocket today is many thousand times more powerful, the IBM had only one task and it did it well, without fail. Prior to this payroll was processed on a large Memorex system, not unlike a knitting machine my mother had when we were young, in which the user fed pay cards with magnetic strips, one by one. This data was then captured on a cassette deck to be replayed later. It didn’t play the latest hits but the sound of money was music to my ears.
Before Donegal VEC, I’d worked in the Motor Tax office in Lifford for two years. There wasn’t even a hint of a computer back then. I was a full on public servant pen pusher signing my name hundreds of times each day.
I’d spend alternate weeks between the public counter and the back office, all the time processing and issuing tax discs. It was often a stressful job dealing with long queues standing in silence hoping to hear if you’d excuse the poor cratur at the top of the queue for not having their form signed at the local Garda station. There were no exceptions. This led to many arguments and much frustration as you sent someone off to Glencolmcille or Malin town to get their form witnessed. The stress of this led to me developing panic attacks. My colleague Sylvester had a different method of dealing with the stress which included jumping over the counter and chasing the argumentative applicant out of the office and down the road.
Prior to my two years in Lifford, I’d been unemployed for nearly as long. I was a stay at home father looking after our beautiful young daughter whilst Margaret went out to work. The early 80’s were tough times. The country was in recession, but unlike the recent dark period, there was little hope of improvement. Not only was there no light at the end of the tunnel, there was no tunnel. On Thursday mornings I’d line up in the orderly queue outside the dole office with Ciara in her pushchair, between builders and plumbers taking a break from their work to sign on. I had been looking for work for over a year when two invites to interview arrived on the same morning. One for IMED, an American medical supplies company in Letterkenny, the other for Donegal County Council. I passed the interview in IMED with flying colours and was asked to sit a practical exam. This consisted of a dexterity exam where I had to move pins from one point on a board to another at speed. I killed it, and feeling rather pleased with myself I enquired further about the actual job. “Well” the interviewer said, holding a plastic tube in one hand and a valve in the other, “you stick these two together”. I couldn’t hide my slowly dropping jaw as I slowly uttered “And?”. No, that was the full extent of the task.
I was lucky to be offered both jobs, a permanent job in IMED and a two month temporary contract in Donegal County Council. I accepted the latter and never regretted my decision.
I bought my first PC for our home in the mid-90s. It was the latest 386 pre-Pentium processor. Unfortunately Bill Gates’ Windows 3.1 promised more than it delivered. You couldn’t play any proper games on it so very quickly one had to learn how to manipulate the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to minimise what loaded at startup and to have the PC load in Dos mode. I wasn’t interested in gaming, but my young kids were. My fun was just getting the games to run. My youngest son, at that time, Nathan had his own version of playing games on the PC. At the spritely age of five, he discovered that anything he dragged to the StartUp window would literally start up the next time the PC was switched on. This led to much gnashing of teeth and hair pulling on my behalf as I waited twenty minutes for the PC as it struggled to load all the various programs he had dragged to the start line.
I remember the day I first properly connected to the internet. It was May 1994. I had taken a call that morning that my colleague and friend Patsy Breslin had died suddenly. He was only 36. Patsy who was our Pensions department, loved nothing more than being on his farm back in Frosses. He’d come into my office to regale stories about farm life and poaching fish from the rivers around home. One day while he was telling a yarn, I mentioned how loud his watch was as I could clearly hear it ticking. He smiled but said nothing and continued his story. On the day he died he was celebrating his first wedding anniversary and looking forward to a night out in Donegal Town. I got a call the next morning to tell me the sad news. He had gone to check the fields while his young wife Maureen readied herself for their night out. At his funeral a few days later, I learned that Patsy had told a colleague about me listening to his ‘watch’, and clarified to him that the ticking I could actually hear was the replacement valve he had surgically implanted in his heart a couple of years earlier. He admitted it kept him awake at night, listening, waiting for it to stop. Unfortunately, the valve did eventually fail that day and it left a good man to die, alone. He was found later that evening, slumped over his tractor.
On the morning I broke the news to colleagues at work, they were distraught. We spent the day in shock, unable to grasp the enormity of our loss. As a distraction, although in hindsight it may seem odd, I demonstrated the Netscape browser which had just been released. I was able to connect to the Moscow state university and download a document by clicking on a hyperlink. Although I didn’t fully realise it then, the hyperlink would change all our lives forever. Unfortunately I was the only person in the room amazed, or even vaguely interested, by what I’d just done.
When I setup CarrickOnLine in the mid 90’s, a site which predated Google, I was amazed at the connections it made with people all over the world. Local news now reached America and Australia faster than it did Carrick Lower. When I put the graveyard online, it allowed those searching make lost connections to those long gone. I had an email from Australia asking about a relative who he believed may have been a priest in Carrick. Two minutes later, I sent him the link to the graveyard at the front of the church. The inscription on Fr. Breslin’s headstone was the missing information he’d spent 25 years looking for.
With the exponential development and growth of technology and the internet in the past 25 years, whether we like it or not, we are now connected on a level never imagined before. Well, that should be the case if we all could get connected. I’ve struggled for twenty years to get broadband to our home. I live just ten minutes from Letterkenny. Initially I had a dialup modem and who doesn’t remember, and miss, the dulcet tune it made as it connected at the lightning speed of 28K. It sounded like an electronic chicken being choked as it downloaded data at the same speed I could write.
When ISDN came along, it doubled the speed of the previous modem. As this needed a new line to be installed, I was soon to get used to the familiar story from Eircom that we was just at the end of the line, a little too far away, and it probably wouldn’t work. After a friendly drunken row with one of their engineers in the Metropolitan pub one night, Noel and his team arrived on site the next day to install ISDN. He rang me at work to say he was out at our house. He advised it was cost 160 green punts to install and if it didn’t work which was very likely, it would cost another 160 green punts to take out. I kindly suggested to Noel that he could take his ISDN line and roughly connect it to where the sun don’t shine.
Over the years we’ve also had various versions of satellite broadband. They were sold as high speed connection which they were at 6:00am when everyone in the surrounding area was asleep. At 6:00pm when everyone actually wanted to connect, and the contention ratio had maxed out, the service was dire.
The evolution of technology and the growth of the internet has been exponential over the last twenty years. It has affected all our lives in both positive and negative ways. We depend on the internet for our news reports and to communicate with our friends and families all over the world. It allows us to work from home, stream the latest movies and music, shop online, book holidays and to search for the best restaurant when we get there. Social media has given us all a platform to share and connect.
The internet is also a dangerous place with a dark criminal underbelly. It is riddled with pornography, online gambling and rife with fake news. Fake news has determined the path of our democratic futures and not just in the USA. I find it ironic to see negative comments online about President Trump and fake news and then have the same people share posts about some ‘wonderful new natural’ cure for cancer.
The future will bring even greater developments to both enjoy and worry over. The developments in AI, artificial intelligence, are amazing and scary in equal measures,. When one thinks of all the major technological breakthroughs in recent years by mankind, you must then wonder how this will grow exponentially when computers start making the decisions for us.
Possibly the greatest technological development over recent years, which I believe will have the greatest social impact on our lives, will be the introduction of the autonomous car. A self-driving vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and moving with little or no human input. There will be no need to own a car. They will be electric and cheap to run. You will book it through an app on your phone, when you want to go out. The car will safely get you home, even after a few drinks, and then return to base to recharge. The car may not need insurance as all autonomous cars will be ‘aware’ of each other and accidents should be rare. Elderly people in rural isolation will once again be connected to their wider community and free to socialise at will. This technology is just around the corner and, I believe, will be common place in less than 10 years.
This may not be the Global Village imagined and it’s certainly not for everyone. We now live in a world where, whether we like it or not, we are all connected. This is a world where we use social media to tell those sitting beside us, that we love them, and send birthday wishes to people we’ve never met. We post shameless selfies online and share precious family pictures with a much wider world. Many of us feel entitled to comment, without consequence, on the personal lives others and feel hurt when our own lives are intruded in such ways. Our privacy continues to be eroded. Big Brother is watching us, but not just through Telescreens as predicted in Orwell’s book, but through the data we share. Most of us carry a mobile handset which allows us to be tracked. Every location we visit, every purchase we make, every comment we post, all leave a trail of Cookie ‘breadcrumbs’ that tell large corporations everything they need to know and lead back to the person we are.
I did eventually manage to get connected at high speed. It only took 20 years. When the National Broadband Plan was announced, I was delighted to see that we were just inside the boundary. I mean literally just inside as the boundary ended at our garden’s edge. I excitedly told the neighbours that SIRO, which brought high-speed internet over the ESB network was coming our way. Then, 18 months ago when all my neighbours did get SIRO, I inquired why we’d been left out, I discovered that one of our ‘dear’ neighbours had prevented access to the ESB pole at the back of her house. I tried discussing this in a hope to persuade her that the internet was a necessity in this modern age, to no avail.
It took many calls, some angry, to the relevant bodies involved but eventually, after the ESB installed a new pole, just for us, we got connected. On testing the new connection we had an amazing 940mb download. We could download a movie in a couple of seconds. Fortunately, this excitement soon wears off. No matter how fast your internet connection is, you still watch a movie in real-time and music is still listened to at the equivalent of 33 and a third revolutions per minute.
Like many, I don’t go far without my smartphone. I use it for everything, taking photos, GPS navigation, online banking, checking email, catching up with the latest news, social media, listening to music and podcast and sometimes I even use it as a phone.
It’s a long way from the old wind up phones of my youth but I’m still likely to yell “Do you not know what day it is?” if you ring me on Christmas Day.