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Red Green

wrote in
:

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:19:03 -0500, Gary H
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:29:17 -0500, Jim Redelfs
wrote:

In article ,
(David Combs) wrote:

Did "tip" and "ring" have something to do with the (tiny) "central
office", where the two women sat in front of this big board in
which you actually connected the phone calls, by pulling out a
wire-and-plug (from the caller's line?) and then stretched it
across the board and plugged it into the callee's socket, thus
"connecting" the call, and then maybe via crank or perhaps button,
generated the "ringing" of the bell on the callee's phone?

Yes.

However, local Operator service you describe was in place long before
the "pair" was introduced.

In smaller, local exchanges, the switchboard was often located in the
parlor of a local resident's home.

The Operator, usually the lady of the house, would go about her
business in the home, stopping to connect calls when they rang in.

She would dry her hands, proceed to the switchboard, don the
"chestset" (large horn-shaped transmitter hung from the neck that
rested on the sternum into which the Operator spoke) (not yet
headset), and answer the call, "Number please!".

Generally, the Operator went to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 PM Sunday
through Thursday and stayed up an hour to two longer on Friday and
Saturday night.

Outside those hours, one dare not ring-up the Operator unless there
was a true emergency, a baby was born,

or someone had died.

I always found it strange that death was treated as an emergency, as
if the deceased isn't going to be dead very long.

"Dad died last night but the doctor was slow getting here, so dad came
back to life." :-)

Caller ... I think he is dead

911 operator ... First let's be surer he is really dead

Caller (sound of gunshot) Yep he's dead.

Reminds me of Monty Python's - Bring out your dead. Still bring me a good
chuckle. Not quite like when I first saw it and my face hurt from laughing
so much. We had a different Purple Pill back then...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs