Do Not Dial Before You Hear the Dialling Tone

Sometimes you have to wonder whether Shanghailanders, despite getting pretty rich, were all that smart. Certainly if, as was the case (see ad below), that the Shanghai Telephone Company was forced to place adverts in the newspapers instructing their subscribers not to start dialling the number until the dial tone kicked in (those of you old enough to remember pre-fibre optical telephone systems will recall that it did used to take a few second between picking up the phone and the dial tone being heard). Clearly premature dialling was causing problems for someone!