Telephones

 A few of my (few) readers are older than I am, and can easily "one-up" me when I speak of "the old days", but I'll set that aside and be happy to hear of your own experiences. To set the stage, I am 66 years old.

Phones already existed in my youth. In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, you could dial anyone else in town with 4 digits. The exchange was 868 and I believe all the 4-digit numbers began with 2. There were party lines. One ring for one party, and two rings for the other. You could eavesdrop on your neighbor's calls by simply picking up the phone to listen. A private line cost more. I believe I heard of 8-party lines. Even they made sense if you saw the phone as a way to convey very brief messages of a factual and time-sensitive nature, such as when your train would be arriving. They were an add-on to a way of life that was pretty good as it was, without the telephone.

The rule when making a call was to let the phone ring ten times before deciding the person you called was not home. That was a full minute. You can imagine the recipient finishing the paragraph they were reading in the newspaper, folding it and standing, stretching, and then walking down one corridor and another before arriving at the single phone in the house and answering. A different pace of life. Phones very rarely just ring these days without someone picking up, but if you waited a full minute, someone on the other end who was deliberately not answering their phone would think you were... emotional, in some way or other.

My grandfather knew his phone exchange as 'Bigelow 4". On the keypad "BI" mapped to "24" and thus the entire thing to "244". Perhaps that was supposed to be easier to remember. The phones only had 24 letters on them -- Q and Z were missing. Around 1980 a friend told another friend that if she dialed 800-POLISHQ she could hear a Polish joke. She took the bait and when she reached the end, she laughed, getting the joke, sensitive to the fact that there was no Q on the phone. The idea that it was just implicitly between P and R wouldn't have occurred to us.

Most phones were comfortingly heavy things that you leased from AT&T. No need to hold onto the base when dialing -- the weight was enough to keep the phone in place. Phones were all dial phones. In the same mind-set that expected you to wait a minute for someone to answer, the time it took you to dial 999-9099 was of no concern. I believe it was 1970 when I saw my first push-button phone, at a friend's house. I don't know how much thought went into the design, but it does intrigue that I do not believe that keypad design has changed in the 50 years since.

Then there came the message machine. After some number of rings (I don't think it was 10 -- more like 5, perhaps?) the machine came on with a prerecorded greeting and you could leave your message. First they were a novelty, then they were common, and there came a point where someone was strange if they didn't have one. When I was in France on a brief visit and heard a message machine come on, I briefly thought, "Wow, they work in French too!" before realizing how silly that was.

And then there is the Business Phone. I have few memories of the early days, probably because I didn't have much occasion to call businesses when I was young. As late as 1972, at a summer job right out of high school, I was tasked with calling ten textbook publishers to ask for what books they had in some specific field. A long-distance call was a Big Deal. And I was supposed to make ten of them in a row! Even though it wasn't my family's money, I was very sensitive to spending somebody's $2.00 a minute, no small sum in 1972 dollars. Perhaps my long-term anxiety was a bit less after I had made those ten calls.

Businesses developed phones with rows of transparent cubical buttons on the bottom to deal with multiple lines. The concept arose of putting someone on hold, of seeing which of several lines might be free. The job of "secretary" was still going strong, and that was part of the job. The human secretary took the messages, often on small pink pads of paper.

This and message machines jointly created "telephone tag", where parties would call each other back and forth and leave messages, neither making it a high priority to actually answer calls.

A friend had worked as a secretary at the Pentagon, and she noted that when officers called each other by way of their secretaries, the lower-ranking officer was obliged to come on the phone first. If the two were of the same rank, the one who achieved that rank first was higher in the pecking order, and tables were available to the secretaries to look this information up.

I don't know when it began... I would have guessed 1984 or so, as it impacted my life? The dreaded development was the business where an automated system answered your call, and after describing several options you were to press one key on your keypad. Businesses are always trying to save money, and it's easy to see how this could save them some secretarial time. If all you did want to know was the store hours, the street address, or the fax number, an automated system could give you that information. It might take you ten times as long as if you could simply ask a human who answered for that information, but that time was your time, not the time of an employee of the company. Soon there came to be one button press leading to a litany of further choices. Sometimes, after all that, you were actually directed to a human. However, you might be "waiting for the next available agent". In the old days, you had no idea how long you might be waiting. In more recent years, the company will often give you some estimate. In either case, this provided a very good justification for "speaker phone" mode.

I remember being annoyed when I first heard "please listen carefully as our menu options have changed". Surely they would give me the date on which they last changed so I could tell if I had to listen or not? No way. It just became a piece of boilerplate.

There came a time when after making a choice the phone might emit a couple tones at a volume to wake the dead, part of their internal signaling system where one electronic agent conveyed information to another, at the expense of your eardrums.

I have had the experience a few times recently, after some elaborate maze of choices and holds, a voice finally came on the line, and, it was -- a real human! It was almost startling.

Of course there was another way the companies came to be saving money besides handling as many calls with automated messages as possible. The expected delays were sufficiently burdensome that you might often just not make your call, deciding you could live without that information.

To my awareness, Google was the first company that simply dispensed with customer service entirely, at least for ordinary users. It surely saved Google a LOT of money. The theory was that the information was available online somewhere, or you could find a forum and ask your question and perhaps find an answer. I think companies also stopped trying to write user-friendly documentation. Some enterprising geeks would have written their own versions, and quite likely at least one of them was better than anything the company would write (and they could avoid time-consuming reviews for accuracy and completeness).

The one place where the trend seems to be slower than elsewhere is the health care sector. I find I can often get a human being pretty quickly at the doctor's or dentist's office. I speculate this is because those businesses are not under the same cut-throat competition as others.

But I do really long for the days when after you bought a product from XYZ Corporation, if you had a problem you could dial a number, and immediately talk with a knowledgeable person who could solve your problem!