POST  OFFICE  

LONDON TELECOMMUNICATIONS REGION.

Telephone: CITy 2000                                                                                               REGIONAL DIRECTOR’S OFFICE,

                                                                                                                                                                                    Waterloo Bridge House,

Your Reference                                                                                                                                                            Waterloo Road

                                                                                                                                                                                            London S.E.1.

P.O. Reference

Dear Miss Parkinson,                                                                                                               3rd August, 1946

         You have now completed your school course, and you are about to take up duty in an exchange.

You are, therefore, on the threshold of your career as a telephonist.

         In what spirit are you entering on that career? Are you looking upon it as a means of livelihood and nothing else, or have you realised something of the great opportunities for service to others which it opens to you? Are you looking to it for what you can get out of it or for what you can put into it? On your point of view in this matter depends the value of your whole career as a telephonist-its value to yourself, its value to the Post Office and its value to the community as a whole. If you look upon it merely as the particular means you have chosen to earn your living, and no more, your own satisfaction in it must be very limited; you will be giving less than is due to the Post Office, as your employer, and above all you will be a much less useful member of the community than you could be and than you want to be.

If, on the other hand, you will enter upon your career with the firm resolve to make the best of the great opportunities which lie open before you to serve your fellow citizens and to contribute to the public good to the best of your ability at all times, then you will find a satisfaction, pride, and a pleasure in your work that you will otherwise miss. Not merely your progress but your personal contentament is bound up in your attitude to your work.

You receive service from others-you travel on the railway, bus and tram, you are served in shops, you make telephone calls. You yourself know, therefore, form personal experience the difference between service helpfully, willingly and cheerfully given, and the service which grudgingly and ungraciously gives the minimum, and I want you to look at the service which it will be in your power to give to others in the light of your own experience.

This opportunity for service which will so soon be yours is a very great one. As a telephonist you will be filling a very important position in the national life. You will be a vital link in the chain in respect of every single call you handle. A great responsibility will, therefore, rest upon you. You can truly feel of every call “It all depends on me”, and you can never know how important that call may be to the caller. If you were making it yourself it would be important to you. Handle it therefore as if it were your own. Remember always that to the subscriber whose call you are handling at the moment you are not just an operator, you represent to him not just your exchange, but the whole Telephone Service, and you have it in your power to raise or lower in his mind the whole reputation of that Service.

You have heard of the Spirit of Service. You know what it means. Will you try to absorb that Spirit, and from the inspiration that it will bring you, to give always of your best, even when your duties many seem monotonous or dull, realising that by such endeavour you will be making life for all more easy and pleasant than it would otherwise be? There is no nobler motto than “I serve”.

I hope you will think this matter over and that you will read this letter again, not only now, but from time to time if you have found it, as I hope you have, some vision of the great opportunities which now lie open before you.

I hope you will be very happy in your new career.

                                                         Yours truly

                                                          CONTROLLER TELEPHONES