I Was Just Thinking How Much the Telephone Technology/System has Changed

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I worked for the telephone company here for a few years. Mountain bell and then AT&T. Had been in customer service for 25+ years. I used to know all the area codes for each state and the more prominent prefixes. I knew all the Idaho city prefixes too. The way Boise's phone system was set up I used to be able to tell you by a phone number prefix what part of town a number was in. (Here in Boise, not in other towns.) I also knew back then that if you couldn't get an answer at a certain company, you could dial a certain number and get the 'back line' or the line less used by a given company. Got a lot of calls through that way. When I worked at the telephone company we would figure hotel phone rates. People calling from their rooms. Rate and route it was called. We also did coin calls all manually. We would hear a certain tone for each coin dropped into the phones at the phone booths. Nickels had one, dimes another, etc. We also set up company calls. This was where a company would have several people on one call. We would call each person separately and add them to the call. It was fun work. Something different every day. That was MECABS system before AT&T. When they came in everything was computerized and the real fun work went away. I thought anyway. On early morning Sundays this one gal and I were often scheduled together. Early mornings it was dead and to pass the time she and I would run over the skits from the previous night's episode of Saturday Night Live. It was hilarious back then. That was the late 70s, early 80s when Gilda Radner and that bunch were on it. Those were the days.