Telephone Memo

As we travel around with our cell phones it's hard to imagine what it must have been like to receive only rare phone calls, and always connected by an operator. If you weren't home the phone would just ring and ring until the operator decided the person was not home. I'm not familiar with this kind of phone though. It appears that the speaker and receiver were fixed and you would just stand next to the phone and talk.

It looks like the girls who sent this, Marvel and Mable, pasted their photo over the printed message. They sent the card from Kingston, Missouri to Marnie Howard in Pueblo, Colorado.  I couldn't find much on Marvel, Mable, and Marnie, except that Mable was born in 1900, and her father John was a mail carrier.

Here's the back of the card, with a message that says:

Hello Marnie

Goodby.

Marvel P.

What Santa Does in His Spare Time

You may have wondered what Santa does when he's not delivering presents. Here's your answer. He likes to work with miniatures and build dollhouses. He also has a habit of answering the phone when he passes a phone booth and hears it ringing. That doesn't happen much anymore because there are so few phone booths.

Oh, and he smokes a pipe.

Here are the backs of the first two cards in the same order. The first one was sent to Viola Vincent in Sidney, New York in 1914. The second one as sent to Miss Cassie Doran in Daleville, Pennsylvania in 1908.

Centurylink - exactly which century?

If you're wondering why this post is late, here's the story.
I called Centurylink when I realized I didn't have a dial tone on our home phone. The repairman came and tinkered about and then left, proclaiming the problem fixed. He never tested the telephone though, which still didn't work. Not only that, but the internet, that worked fine before his fateful visit, now didn't work either. It turns out he knew the problem wasn't fixed, because Centurylink had not closed the repair ticket. He must have had other plans.

I won't describe the many phone calls to Centurylink or the number of times I had to enter my phone number, repeat my name, address, and social security number, and re-state the problem. In all, I spent several hours on hold listening to recorded assurances that Centurylink strives to provide excellent customer service and my call is important to them. In any case, their automated caller confirmed that a repair technician would be at my house between 8 am and 11 am. You guessed it - no one showed up! Another hour on hold, and I was told that a technician would be here by 8 pm. Sigh. Anyway, I'm happy to say that it's finally fixed.

It hasn't always been like this. Technology may have moved forward, but it doesn't mean that customer service has. Here's a great example of customer service: the Chinese Telephone Exchange in San Francisco. It opened in 1909, and was staffed with operators who had to speak fluent English as well as five Chinese dialects. They also had to remember not only the names of the thousands of Chinatown residents, but also where they lived. They had to know what they did for a living too, so they could distinguish between two people with the same name.

The exchange was destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake, but was rebuilt and continued to operate until 1949 when the rotary phone system made the switchboard obsolete. For more on the Chinese Telephone Exchange, including video footage from the 1920s, be sure to visit the fabulous foundSF website.

Here's a great card showing the interior of the Chinese Telephone Exchange.

Cherub with Phone

Since when do cherubs talk on the phone anyway? Well, at least it's not a cell phone.

It must be hard to type on a textured card like this, but it didn't stop Anna Calway, who was writing to her friend Nancy Davis in Merrifield, New York.  Only at the end did she add a couple of handwritten words, including: "Don't mind how this is written" on the side.

Hello! Central! Give Me 999

This amusing postcard is from around 1905.  You can tell it's earlier than 1907, because it has an undivided back, which only allows for the address on the backside. If people wanted to write messages on postcards at that time, they had to write on the picture side or not write one at all. So, you might receive a mysterious postcard with no message and be left wondering who sent it and what they intended. In 1907, U.S.  postcards were made with a divided back with space for both the address and a message. That's when the fun really started.

At the time of this postcard, there were just over three million telephones in the United States, all connected by manual telephone exchanges. (Note: Today there are over 100 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S.) Manual exchange meant that every call you made went through an operator; there were no numbers to dial yourself. If the number you were calling was in the same exchange, the operator would simply connect the lines on the switchboard. If it was in another exchange, she would have to connect with the operator at that exchange and ask her to connect the call. Long distance calls were pricey though, so you didn't want to make very many of them or stay on the line too long.  I don't know the significance of the 999 number; it's the emergency number in a lot of countries, but not in the U.S.