Comments by "roachtoasties" (@roachtoasties) on "David Hoffman" channel.

Those are the old TSPS positions. The lower right corner is where an operator's right hand would spend most of its time, typing in phone or calling card numbers. Above that there were two rows of buttons for the type of call (collect, third number, person-to-person, etc.). From what I recall, the red lights on the top row indicated the call coming from a pay phone. White lights, the call was from a non-pay phone. An operator could hold three calls in those slots where paper tickets could be held for active calls and vertical buttons in the middle. Most all calls, though, could just be let go (released), and not held at the position. To release a call, the button was near the lower left. The display was just numbers. I believe these positions faded from use in the late 1980's. Now, an operator, has got to be a person in front of a desktop PC with a couple monitors, just like the rest of us. I can't even remember the last time I called an operator. There might be an office or two of telephone operators somewhere in the U.S., but technology and the business has long moved on.
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Lots of earthshaking work is being done in high rise office buildings. What would we do without a perfect photograph of a spoonful of cornflakes? This reminds me of my first job at Taco Bell. Once in a while a customer would come in and ask for their food to look like the picture. One time we had some old display pictures in back, and I gave the customer that. They didn't think that was funny. I managed to work my entire life in Los Angeles (mainly I.T.) without being in a building that was over three floors, and the highest my office has been is the second floor. It's been a low rise life for me.
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It's still possible if you want to buy a fully-refundable ticket to that flight or another leaving about the same time, go thru security, wave your friend goodbye, don't board the plane then ask for a refund.
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As far as Akihabara, things look similar from when the last time I visited. The main difference is the replaced lit signs and lights with LED stuff. The electronics have changed. Most of that today is in a landfill. Maybe one thing that's the same are basic calculators. They look the same.
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Just ask the question in BASIC: 10 PRINT "WHO ARE YOU?" 20 INPUT A$ 30 PRINT A$ 40 GO TO 10
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A co-worker was telling me he was a directory assistance operator for a telephone company in California when he was younger. "What city?" He didn't like it either. There's nothing fun about looking up phone numbers all day while being closely supervised.
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@eemoogee160 Just remember fully refundable tickets for anything are quite expensive, but you'll get it all back. Of course, being a worker or vendor at the airport gets you in with no problem too.
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I'm unsure about the "beautiful life" part. When I was a younger, I did take a job with AT&T/Pacific Telephone as a TSPS Operator in the San Fernando Valley (I'm a male). I'm not going to go into the details here, but things didn't end well and I ended up taking legal action against them (we settled out of court). You basically sit there at your operator's position all day, expected to average 30 seconds a call acting like a robot, while there is usually a supervisor in the corner of the room monitoring you and others. I lasted about 32 months. After that stint I went on to other employment, finished my university degree, and eventually became an application developer for a major organization. The pay, how you're treated, freedom, benefits, etc., I can't even compare how better things are.
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Some things don't change. The monotony continues, except the monotonous jobs are different. As far as building cars on an assembly line, if one is doing that all day, their body will wear out well before retirement age. In the end, when they look back at their lives, the job sucked, and after all that, they've worn your body to the point where they can't even enjoy retirement on their auto industry pensions. The auto industry film at the end probably didn't cheer up many assembly line workers. If they were singing for the film, they would be singing the blues. :/
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I had a job where all the phones had one. It was the greatest of inventions. We always had two hands free to work with. Efficiency at its best!
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@Catmom2004 Thanks. It's probably best I keep my experience with AT&T to myself as someone who sat at one of those boards in the San Fernando Valley, but I moved on and and have been very successful in the I.T. field. AT&T's loss.
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I think the writing was on the wall in the 1980's, but nobody was sure when telephone operators would basically vanish. Technology and the business basically created a slow and agonizing good-bye, as operator offices slowly closed and remaining operators either had to transfer to another office (which might require moving) or being laid off. The final nail in the coffin came in the 2000's as smart phones and VOIP technologies evolved. Now people don't even want to answer the phone since most are robocalls. We communicate in other ways. Even assistive technologies evolved for users who need them. That left the operators either needing to learn a new skill, maybe working at the cellphone store, being let go or retiring early. Resistance or denying this was happening doesn't work. It's best I keep my brief experience working for AT&T (less than three years) to myself, but I felt no love or feeling important from AT&T managers. It was like "now that we hired you, lets figure out a way to fire you." I eventually moved on to an information technology career elsewhere, with AT&T just being a distant memory for me.
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I can't even remember the last time I talked to an operator. During the late 1990's and into this century, basically there wasn't a need to automate what an operator does anymore, since there ended up being no reason left to dial 0 or an 0+ call. In watching this again, I see the operators were concerned this technology would end their jobs. The thing is, now, even if operators went back to using cord boards, there still would be no need for operators (other than maybe a handful of them). Now, it isn't the automation of their jobs, it's nobody calls the operator anymore. The technology and the business left their jobs obsolete. No more payphones, along with better smart phones, VOIP, etc., left operators with nothing to do. With the spread of robocalls, now nobody even wants to pick up the phone. The operators in this video eventually needed to look for another job, inside or outside the phone company, or retire, regardless of this voice recognition technology.
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For a 40 year career as an operator (if they can handle the job for that long), that brought them to 1998. There were a few operators left then, and given their seniority, they probably still had jobs if they accepted transfers as offices slowly closed, although I would think they would have applied for other positions by then. That said, many people spent their entire working lives at cord boards/TSPS consoles.
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If that pile of stuff worked for him, that's all that counted. When did he pass away? With all that stuff, nobody had to pay for a cremation. Just light a match in there, and there you go. :/
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I watched this again after a year. An interesting perspective of the time. It wasn't only voice recognition that basically ended the need for telephone company operators, but it was how the business and technology evolved, to the smartphone and beyond. It must have been in the late 90's when I called a department store. An automated voice asked me what department I wanted to be connected to. I kept saying "televisions." After three or four tries, I got an automated response saying "connecting to foundations" (women's undergarments). I still laugh about that.
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True story: I once worked in a clinic. A patient came in with a diagnosis of memory loss telling me he missed his appointment. I had to ask him why, and he said "I forgot."
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Direct international long distance dialing was gradually introduced in the U.S. from the 1970's into the early 80's. It was mainly dependent on your local office being upgraded to electronic switching. If you couldn't dial 011+country code+area code/phone number, you had to call the operator for them to dial it for you. Some countries still couldn't be dialed direct, but eventually every country was. Most of Europe was a region that could be dialed direct first. Areas like Canada could be dialed direct before international dialing, because they shared the "1" country code and area code scheme. Of course now, with VOIP, Zoom, Teams Meeting, etc., etc., there is a generation that has never called an operator.
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If the scientist only knew we wouldn't be transmitting matter, but garbage TikTok videos of people twerking. It's better he didn't know, or he would have jumped out the window.
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We'll never have a paperless office, so forget the predictions. Everyone where I work has one or two PC's (maybe more) and two monitors, with networked all-in-one printers/faxes/scanners/photocopiers everywhere. They're churning out paper all the time, and will be, until the world is out of trees. We also have a supply room, like where you interviewed this woman. Any employee can go down to it to pick up forms, and even more paper, along with stuff to help you with your paper (folders, staplers, notebooks, paperclips, pens, etc., etc., etc., etc.). In fact, there's an old storage closest next to my office. It's big. It ends up being a dumping grounds for paper and supplies that are no longer needed or forgotten. There are items and documents going back farther than when this video was made (1979). The stuff can be thrown out, but nobody has the motivation to do it.
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@davidtaylor9999 I tried on my cellphone. I reached nobody. I got an announcement saying to hang up and dial 911, 611, 411 and so on. depending on what I wanted. No operator.
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Was this before or after May 25th, 1979? That was that big DC-10 crash in Chicago. It made a lot of people think planes were not safe when the engine tore off the wing during takeoff, taking everyone's life on the plane along with injuries on the ground.
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