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10 November 1983 (media.piefed.social)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/bloomcounty@sopuli.xyz
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10 November 1983
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[–] [S] 4 points 2 days ago (7 children)

"Directory Assistance, city and listing please?" "Please hold for that number"

Or

"city and listing please?" "Please hold for that number"

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (6 children)

    Would you ever connet people directly, or would that just encourage overutilization?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 days ago (5 children)

    We did not have an option to connect. We were the precursor to overseas call centers. Normally directory assistance operators handled 1, maybe 2 area codes. Ours did Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, all of New York excluding NYC, Washington DC, and I think Massachusetts. Almost all of those states had at least 2 area codes.

    Calls for Jersey were the worst, between the accents, and only giving an exit number instead of a town, their calls were next to impossible to handle.

    The regular DA operators hated us. Their union would not let us join, we had to join IBEW, and they really wanted nothing to do with us.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (4 children)

    What was the problem with Jersey? What is an exit number? Why did the area codes matter at all? Because they were in seperate books? I imagine you just had a big stack of books on your desk.

    Interesting inside baseball. I notice Unions sometimes carry the seeds of their own destruction--protecting their turf instead of expanding their membership. I'll never forget an article I read about union members torpedoing a health care plan because it would mean everyone would get better benefits without being in a union and the benefits unions had sacrificed wages for would be compartatively less. It's an impossible subject to bring up among progressives, because we depend on union organizing and don't want to talk shit about the single best counter to capital.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Exit number off the New Jersey Turnpike. "Oh they live off exit...." but they didn't know what town it was.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 day ago

    Why did the area codes matter at all? Because they were in seperate books? I imagine you just had a big stack of books on your desk.

    We had one computer, very rarely did an actual phone book get taken off the shelf. There issue was we had no local knowledge of the area. So a caller asking for the number of the new dress shop next to the camera shop on Penn Street would be out of luck, unless there was a listing for dress shop on Penn Street, but maybe its address is actually 6th Street, the listing would not show it was actually 6th and Penn.

    It is much the same as when you call for tech support and you get an over seas agent that support 30 different companies. They have never seen your product, much less used it. They are seeing what their computer is showing them, no personal knowledge.

    As for the unions thing, the operators did not want us to join their union because we were a threat to their jobs, and we were... But not by our own choice.

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