The essence of a telephone operator’s job was to efficiently connect a caller to someone they wanted to call during an era when the technology was not yet sophisticated enough to allow direct connection. For many years it meant physically plugging and unplugging wires into the switchboard, connecting or disconnecting callers. The idea for a […]

By the 1960s, advancing technology meant most callers didn’t need operators to make local phone calls. But operators continued to patch through collect calls, person-to-person calls and long-distance calls. Remember those? Collect call: You would place a call through an operator, who would connect to the person you were seeking and ask them if they […]