For a book I'm working on I'm looking for someone with experience of telephone exchange switchgear from the 1950s. Basically I need to know what options an exchange operator would have had for listening in to calls he/she had connected, and how it would have worked physically. #telephone#electronics#communications#phone#writing#writer#writers
Well I haven’t seen one of these for awhile in the wild. Unfortunately it’s out of service. Maybe their provider is @shadytel, which would make its uptime far less surprising.
@catnip@mwichary#Calculators (mechanical, natch) were uncommon in the 1950s when Bell Labs was developing the #telephone#keypad, and hadn’t even settled on a common layout. In their testing they found that the top-to-bottom layout was slightly faster to use, so they went with that.
Des gens sur Toulouse ou Paris qui savent changer la batterie d'un Samsung e10+ ? Ou connaissent là où je peux le faire faire d'ailleurs.
J'ai pas le matos ni les compétences pour le faire T-T mais aucune envie de changer de tel.
Le rt est doux #Toulouse#repair#telephone
The last two weeks I have noticed an uptake in scammers using 800 numbers, as such I have now blocked ALL inbound 800 numbers coming into my telephone switch.
Sometimes when I'm trying to reach a human for customer service, and the system won't route me to a person if I use the typical techniques (multiple zero presses, saying "agent", not saying anything through multiple timeouts, etc.), I use the "mystery language" technique to some considerable success:
SYS: I cannot connect you to anyone if you do not explain to me the nature of your problem.
ME: Dasbuton terra masiqu! Bashro normani grikkola-ban-nano!
SYS: I'm not sure I understand you, will you please repeat that?
ME: Dasbuton terra masiqu!!!! BASHRO normani grikkola-ban-NANO!!!!
SYS: Please hold while I transfer you to a customer service agent.
Another technique - some systems that won't obey "agent" or "operator" will detect angry "fuck"s and other curses 😂 and route you to a human. Apparently it's basically "Is this caller frustrated enough to make trouble?". I have found it to work a couple of times when nothing else did...
I write about science and technology and their cultural effects. My books include Chaos, The Information, and Time Travel, as well as biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton.