The Glass is Half-Full

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 t...