Wired for Sound

I’m no electrician and maybe that’s why I was impressed with the wiring in Bangkok. I wasn’t impressed with the way everything was wired but I was impressed with the sheer volume of wires that could be seen and the mass of the intricate tangles that ensued. I feel that I’ve made my own tangles of wires hooking up stereos, surround sound systems and computers that were pretty impressive. But my absolute worst tangle pales to a good Bangkok wiring job. I took many photos trying to fully depict a wiring tangle but never was able to fully do it justice.

Likely related to the wiring situation was the state of telephone communication in Bangkok in 1982. Of course, this was a decade or more before cell phones came into use so everything depended on land lines, even when the land lines were miles deep under an ocean (Is it really a land line if it’s underwater? Is the ocean bottom land?)

I should probably confess that I have never been a fan of telephones. I don’t mind talking to and with people but somehow, talking to a piece of plastic never appealed to me. Even as a youngster, the mere prospect of a phone conversation would bring on an anxiety attack. Needless to say, this was a problem for my dating life during my teens and beyond. What if her brother answered the phone? What if her sister? Yikes most off all, what if her father answered???!!! I muddled through though, and made the calls I had to make but even to this day, I’ll put off phone calls and/or try to convince Marcia to make the call if I can. No, cell phones and hearing loss don’t help. They only make it worse.

So any phone call we made was fraught with psychological hesitation and circuitous circuits. In spite of the obstacles though, the phones often worked.  There were reasonably good prospects of making even international calls back to the US from the Bangkok Christian Guest House (BCGH) and the TBMF office. At times the sound was quite clear though there was always a lag as the sound made its’ journey across the oceans.  As a new arrival, we weren’t too interested in local calls as we couldn’t speak Thai as yet. In fact, I lived in fear of picking up a phone and hearing Thai and even Marcia didn’t like that prospect.

While the BCGH and TBMF office had international phone capability, our apartment did not. As I recall, there was some kind of switchboard operator we had to go through and then we could only do local calls. So with general phone anxiety and little to no Thai we didn’t use the phone in the apartment.

At the same time, this was the age of the “Phone-A-Mission”. In the US, regional Baptist offices had speakers that could tie into the phone at a local church. With enough wires running enough directions, the phone speaker could be put next to the pulpit microphone and a phone conversation with a missionary on the other side of the world could be broadcast to the whole congregation. It was technology in its’ most advanced form (for 1982)!

We’d been writing letters back and forth to churches in the US and there was a church that wanted to do a Phone-A-Mission with us. We still hadn’t done anything to talk about except start language school and battle stomach issues but we were game if they were. Since we couldn’t do an international call at our apartment, we trekked up to the BCGH to wait for the phone call. We were nervous about the call in general and nervous about getting the time wrong, so we went to the Guest House an hour early.

The phones capable of making an international call were in the main lobby so, not a good place to make secret plans, but good enough for our purposes. Especially since it was something like 11:00 pm at night and the lobby was pretty vacant (except for us) we weren’t worried about who would overhear us. So we came in, sat down and started finalizing our strategy when the phone rang.

Marcia: Could it be for us?

Duane: No, we we’re here and hour early.

Marcia: Are you sure?

Duane: Not really. How does Daylight Savings affect the time?

Marcia: I don’t know, I thought you did.

Duane: Should we answer it?

Marcia: What if it’s a Thai? We won’t know what they said or how to answer.

As we’re conversing and suffering “paralysis by analysis” the phone keeps ringing. Finally, Phil McDaniel (A missionary doctor serving at the Kwai River Christian Hospital) got tired of hearing the phone ring. He came out of his room, burst through the doors into the lobby, took a quizzical look in our direction, proceeded to the still ringing phone and answered it.

Now, I suspect Dr. Phil was not bothered by all the phone anxiety I grew up with. I also know he grew up in Thailand and spoke Thai with nary an accent. So he was likely not worried about whether the person on the phone spoke Thai, English, Burmese or whatever. He was also likely busy with something in his Guest House room or he wouldn’t have been awake at that hour. So, he said “Hello” into the phone, paused a little, then turning and looking at us, said in a combined perplexed, aggravated and quizzical manner, “Well, they’re sitting right here!!!”

With that, he set the phone down, and went back to his room baffled as to why we hadn’t answered the phone. And with that, we went to the phone red faced (though I’m confident the US church couldn’t see our red face), and completed our first Phone-A-Mission. We later reviewed the effect of Daylight Savings Time on local Bangkok time. We never figured it out and we wouldn’t be able to Google the time for another 16 years, but it was a good thing we showed up an hour early so we could be right on time (as long as Dr. Phil could answer the phone)!