And you could call this 800 number from any phone anywhere, punch in your mailbox number, and listen to the messages. So he’d leave me messages about anything happening that I needed to know about.

Oh, he said, lots of Europe doesn’t have touch-tone yet. So get yourself a DTMF tone generator, like this. Just place the international call to the 800 number then hold this up to the handset and punch your mailbox number. Easy.

So off we go to Florence and Rome. Except that four days before I left, John fired Steve and put Jean-Louis in charge of all product development. And further organizational news would follow.

Whee!

So we’d settled in to a little pensione in Florence near the Piazza Della Signora. (No view of the Arno.) After jet lag and the initial tourist stops, a couple days in I begin to wonder a bit about what’s happening back home.

The pensione of course doesn’t have guest telephones in the room, or even the lobby. I’m used to this. To make a phone call,

(Sit down, youngsters)

To make a phone call you had to go to the PTT in the square, go to the basement, take a number, have a seat, wait until you are called, go to the booth they indicate, then give the number you want to call to the operator (who only speaks Italian). They dial, you talk, then on the way out you pay in lira.

The operators had been doing things this way since the end of WWII, and dealt with hundreds of foreign tourists a day, mostly students on Eurail passes doing the Let’s Go Europe backpacking tour and calling home usually to get parents to wire money to the American Express office so they can make it to the next city. I’d done that, I knew the drill. And so did they.

But this time I was a Businessman, a Technologist, and I had something Important to do. With Technology.

The first problem was getting them to dial a toll-free number in the US. There is no reason to make an international call to a toll-free US number, and they didn’t know how or care to learn. It was not Done. You called your parents, your spouse, maybe your office.

Then when I managed to get them to dial it, when it picked up they rattled off their boilerplate spiel and waited for a reply. And none came because it was a voicemail box.

So they hung up.

This took more tries (and more lira)

My Italian was nothing like up to the challenge of explaining to an Italian telephone operator how to do her job differently than she had ever done it before. But even when I convinced them that it was OK, nobody would answer, and they let me connect to what they felt was dead air… then I did something astounding and frightening.

I PLAYED THE DTMF TONES.