Are there still telephone operators? I remember dialing (even actually dialing on a rotary phone!) 0 - to call collect or reverse the charges. Mostly to my parents because I didn't have the dime (yes a dime!!) to call home to ask for a ride or to ask if I could go to a friend's house after school. Like rotary phones, I wonder if operators are a thing of the past . . .
I just did a quick Google search and there were job listings for telephone operators. Interesting!! Particularly because I think Google has largely replaced another relic of the past - calling information to get a phone number for a person or business. I'm not sure if these calls were answered by operators between calls from adolescent girls calling their parents collect or if there were people in a room with a lot of phone books looking up numbers for callers.
Which makes me think of another past relic, phone books. These often unwieldy tomes were delivered once a year and depending on the city or town there might even be a separate book called the Yellow Pages for businesses. Google and other forms of technology have replaced the usefulness of these books. I loved the scene in "The Jerk" when Steve Martin's character is excited to see his name in print in the phone book, saying to family he's "finally a somebody"! Of course their demise cannot be attributed solely to Google or the World Wide Web, it might also have to do with our growing reliance on cell phones.
According to an Associated Press article (that I found via Google) 45.9 percent of all households still have a landline and 39 percent have both a landline and a cell. So that could explain why there are job listings for operators and pay phones may be sparse but they do still exist and phone books are thinner and used less, but it I'm willing to wager that no one reading this still has (or more precisely is using)one of these:
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