The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-08-26

stHOutS open, early closing nouiS ohS ~ l thing of the past and the life Of the city enters on another period of hus- ting, the telephone lines get busy again. They have been busy all sum" mer. for that matter, but the operator ! In the city has shifted a little or her burden to her country cousin for the time being. Now she must take 1t all upon herself again.
 First and last. Central" is one ot the busiest persons you could find in long days journey and her services are in constant and increasing demand as Is shown by the fact that the mum Der of telephones in the Bell system has reached 2,S00, 900 and Is growing at the rate of 25 per cent year In one way the telephone operator Is at disad- vantage in the business world because her patrons cannot see her do her work, but if telephone user took the trouble to time Central with stop watch he would find that she is about the spryest person that he has to deal with. Telephone managers do not use stop watches in timing operators but the tests made at regular intervals in every Bell office show that on the average | subscribers signal Is answered within five seconds after it Is given and com munication Is established over the line wanted within ten seconds after that. It is not the operators fault, of course. If line is busy, or if no one answers her ringing. or if the person called Is slow in getting to his telephone It IS rather her misfortune, for often she is blamed for it as if she were personally | responsible.
 But while the telephone girl is some times S-unjustly blamed she has her champions. Recently, at a dinner, In Illinois, someone was called to respond to the toast, .The Telephone Girl" He was evidently a man who had given more thought to his response than many an after dinner speaker, for what he said showed an understanding of his. subject that would save much profanity and quite as much heart burning IT IL were more general
 'If I go into a grocery store on Sat- urday night when every clerk Is on the jump he declared, land yell that have an important engagement and de-. mand that the clerk leave the. customer he IS waiting upon and attend to my wants because my business is almighty important. the proprietor informs me that if l will have a little patience will be waited upon in my turn; and that is exactly right. Yet this same merchant will take the head off of the poor telephone girl because there arc rush times in her office when the shut | ters fall like snow flakes in a noun | tain storm, during which she is unable to answer his phone in fraction of a minute. He intimates that unless his phone is answered at once he proposes to go to the city council to see what can be done about rotten service The butcher complains about the blunder- | ing telephone girl and makes the air smell of sulphur every time she hap pens to give him the wrong number, but he sings mighty low when tell him that I go home and find my wife in tears because she has company for dinner, ordered her meat at nine o'clock and the blundering butcher sent It to the wrong house.
 "Yet the same men forget that thousand subscribers may want to talk | all at once, and have right to, even at night. They will not grant the same consideration to the telephone business they demand for themselves. Accord | Ing to them, the telephone girl has no right anyone is bound to respect She
 Is responsible if the party the subscrib-
 CT wants to talk to Is out, if one of the
 hundreds of screws connected with the phone is loose. if the dress did not get. | hcme from the dressmaker, if there
 was a delay in calling the fire depart
 ment, because 1t was not called five minutes before the fire had broken out. In fact, she is to blame for everything.
 
 forget that she Is a human being and lady, although she tolls for her daily bread"
 Evidently here was man who had had experience with Central" calcu lated to bring home to him her eff1c- | iency in spite of her faults The same 1 thing was expressed in a different way by another speaker, here in Boston, | little while ago, who said that the telephone had become so much a part of our daily lives that we regard it, and all connected with it, as we would part of our household.
 When a man complains that the bacon Is not quite right and the eggs are done too much," he said that the coffee is too strong and, the mullins are
 too cold, it Is a sure sign that general
 ly his breakfast is just to his liking.
 His wife, or the cook, or whosoever 1t | may be. has set a standard which ho | takes so much as a matter of course
 that he says nothing about 1t until, | because of some mishap-perhaps be-
 cause he himself is late in coming to
 the table and has kept things waiting
 until they are cold breakfast Is not quite as good as usual. It takes a phi l losopher to look at 1t that way, know,
 but really. isn't 1t true that such oc-
 casional fault finding is the surest token of a generally satisfactory state
 of affairs?
 That. 1t seems to me, Is one way of regarding complaints about the tele-
 phone service We have all had trouble
 with the telephone; I have and every
 body has. We all know how exasperat- ing 1t can be. But isn't the fact that
 It annoys us so once in great while 1 evidence that the service Is pretty good most of the time so that when
 there is little mole hill 1t looks al- most like a mountainT
 Last year more than 18,000.000,000 conversations passed through the of
 fices of the Bell system. How many of
 these gave ground for fault finding 1 nobody has figured out. But those who have such matters in charge here in
 Boston, which has the reputation of
 being the most critical of all cities, say
 that their attention is drawn to what
 the telephone user considers a defect in the service about once in 2S,00O conver-
 sations.
 Partly because telephone users are
 becoming better acquainted with the
 working of the service, and partly as
 the result of constant mechanical i'm
 provements and the painstaking train
 ing of employees, these proportions are
 growing smaller all the time. If the
 public doesn't understand the difficulty of Central" work, the telephone
 manager does Formerly girls could
 be trained at a switchboard In an ex-
 change, by observation and by practice
 on lines that were not very busy. Now
 the traffic in conversation has become
 so heavy that in large cities the Bell