Does anyone call the operator anymore

Surprisingly, I was able to reach an operator on all of these phones. I did notice that some of the Nokia phones blocked dialing zero. Not quite sure why, but some of my other Nokia handsets were able to do this without a problem. Dialing zero only let you dial a collect call.

Dialing zero-zero was necessary to reach a real operator. On T-Mobile, calling the operator was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Phone operators are essentially customer service personnel, and need to have a certain set of skills:.

If you have the skills and a strong sense of nostalgia, then why not? Want More Content Like This? Your email address is already registered.

We take the ability to pick up the phone, or indeed make a call through our computer completely for granted. Of course, if you had several clients to call, that would have involved several pairs of telephones, so a more practical solution was born — the telephone exchange.

The first telephone operators at the Boston Telephone Dispatch company in were teenage boys. Whatever you might think about the communication skills of teenage boys, they were clearly no better over a century ago.

They were considered rude, uncommunicative, and just too plain unruly to do a decent job. In September of the same year, Emma Nutt became the first woman telephone exchange operator. Women were seen as the smarter choice — they were more gracious, better-mannered, and without the benefit of modern labor and wage laws, infinitely cheaper to employ than even a boy. Coy, a Civil War veteran who worked in the telegraph business, soon made a deal with Bell to set up the first telephone exchange in the United States, a central switchboard that allowed anyone with a telephone to call or be called by anyone else who had one.

That Coy would employ boys to do a job later associated mostly with girls and young women was only natural. Boys often worked at telegraph offices, while female telegraph operators were a rarity. That would continue into the early days of the telephone. But by the beginning of the 20 th century, women began dominating the field. And as their numbers grew they became a powerful force—fighting for the right to join unions, striking for higher wages, even serving overseas in World War I. Group of telephone operators c.

In many places, operators were closely monitored, subject to strict rules about dress code and behavior, with punishments for talking, laughing or even smiling. They had a tendency to roughhouse. Often that meant going house to house, trying to persuade parents that telephone operator was a respectable job for their daughters. As the number of telephones in the U.