Word: dial
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vernon. Until a couple of years ago, Mount Vernon was served by crank telephones and calls routed by two elderly operators who knew everyone in town. One townsman recalls: "They knew where everybody was and used to transfer calls if you were visiting somebody. Now we just have this dial stuff that gets only a lot of noise in the receiver...
Motherless Sons. The most savage sequence is a telephone game blundered into by Alan (Peter White), a possible "straight" who was once the host's college roommate. Each player must dial, and then blurt "I love you" to the person he holds dearest. All the players are stoned out of their minds, but not out of their situations. Amid the four-letter confrontations, ugly-and sometimes beautiful-revelations occur, until finally the game's inventor is buried alive in a landslide of truths...
...Marshall McLuhan did not intend to spread alarm when he described communications networks as "extensions of our physical and nervous systems." What happens when that central extension, the telephone network, shows symptoms of a nervous breakdown? For a distressing number of months, it has. When there should be a dial tone, all too often there is only silence or a snap, crackle and pop. Sometimes a call connects to someone else's conversation. The epitaph for much of 1970 America could be "Sorry, the number that you have dialed is not a working number...
...Bell people's commonplace explanation for all the trouble is that the system is overloaded. When more than 20% of the phones on an exchange are in use at the same time, the dial tone is delayed as calls stack up like planes over an airport. Planning ahead to avoid such overloads is the essence of efficiency and probably management's single most important function. The tangle in the New York telephone system today offers a case study in what happens when a company gets its number wrong...
...calls to operators answered within five seconds, 90% of calls for repairs answered within 20 seconds, and a repairman dispatched within two hours. That would be a considerable improvement on today's performance. New York Telephone's current goal is ten seconds to get a dial tone or an operator, and four to 24 hours to send a repairman to the house. One measure of how far the telephone system has fallen is that what seemed natural only a few years ago appears positively Utopian today...