From news.spc.edu!news.new-york.net!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!telecom-digest.org!ptownson Tue Dec 9 02:55:05 1997 Xref: news.spc.edu comp.dcom.telecom:67206 Path: news.spc.edu!news.new-york.net!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!telecom-digest.org!ptownson Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 19:29:27 -0500 From: amp@pobox.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Remembering Information Please Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: editor@telecom-digest.org Approved: [comp.dcom.telecom/944b6256de9bb876ea7a12d80db7ce22] X-URL: http://telecom-digest.org/ X-Submissions-To: editor@telecom-digest.org X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 17, Issue 344, Message 7 of 7 Lines: 180 Don't know if this is true, but it's a good story nonetheless. ************************************ Information Please When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother used to talk to it. Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person - her name was Information Please and there was nothing she did not know. Information Please could supply anybody's number and the correct time. My first personal experience with this genie-in-the-bottle came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn't seem to be any reason in crying because there was no one home to give sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway - The telephone! Quickly I ran for the footstool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up I unhooked the receiver in the parlor and held it to my ear. "Information Please", I said into the mouthpiece just above my head. A click or two and a small clear voice spoke into my ear. "Information." "I hurt my finger. . ." I wailed into the phone. The tears came readily enough now that I had an audience. "Isn't your mother home?" came the question. "Nobody's home but me." I blubbered. "Are you bleeding?" "No," I replied. "I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts." "Can you open your icebox?" she asked. I said I could. "Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it to your finger." After that I called Information Please for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math, and she told me my pet chipmunk I had caught in the park just the day before would eat fruits and nuts. And there was the time that Petey, our pet canary died. I called Information Please and told her the sad story. She listened, then said the usual things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was unconsoled. Why is it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to all families, only to end up as a heap of feathers, feet up on the bottom of a cage? She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, "Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in." Somehow I felt better. Another day I was on the telephone. "Information Please." "Information," said the now familiar voice. "How do you spell fix?" I asked. All this took place in a small town in the pacific Northwest. Then when I was 9 years old, we moved across the country to Boston. I missed my friend very much. Information Please belonged in that old wooden box back home, and I somehow never thought of trying the tall, shiny new phone that sat on the hall table. Yet as I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me; often in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding, and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy. A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down in Seattle. I had about half an hour or so between planes, and I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone with my sister, who lived there now. Then without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, "Information Please". Miraculously, I heard again the small, clear voice I knew so well, "Information." I hadn't planned this but I heard myself saying, "Could you tell me please how-to spell fix?" There was a long pause. Then came the soft spoken answer, "I guess that your finger must have healed by now." I laughed, "So it's really still you," I said. "I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time." "I wonder, she said, if you know how much your calls meant to me. I never had any children, and I used to look forward to your calls." I told her how often I had thought of her over the years and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister. "Please do, just ask for Sally." Just three months later I was back in Seattle. A different voice answered Information and I asked for Sally. "Are you a friend?" "Yes, a very old friend." "Then I'm sorry to have to tell you. Sally has been working part-time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago." But before I could hang up she said, "Wait a minute. Did you say your name was Paul?" "Yes." "Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down. Here it is I'll read it. 'Tell him I still say there are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean'." I thanked her and hung up. I did know what Sally meant. ------------------------------------ Have you seen http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum ------------------------------------ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Somewhere around 1959-60 in {Reader's Digest} is where your 'Information Please' appeared when I first saw it. It was at least 35 years ago, so pardon me if I do not recall the exact issue. :) In those days, {Reader's Digest} tended only to reprint things from other print media, so the story had to have been somewhere else before they got it. So it might be forty years old, but I have never used it here before that I can recall. Its a good, very warm story, and I enjoyed printing it here today but whether it is true or not is hard to say. I put it in the same category as the lady who had the dog tied to the telephone pole in the backyard and her phone did not work right unless the dog did his thing around the pole, and you know how that one went. I'd say Sally, if she existed, and what the heck, let's say she did, was a pretty typical Bell System employee. They were extremely bureaucratic, but extremely dedicated, and with *very* long memories where customer requirements and satisfaction was concerned. All the old timers could tell stories about service to customers that today would be hard to believe or match. As Charles Brown, former Chairman of AT&T and President of Illinois Bell once said during a particularly trying event in the divestiture process, "So when was the last time they (meaning MCI) sent two workers out to the mountains of Montana in January to restore service for a handful of customers whose cable had gotten broken in an ice storm, only to have the two workers slip in the ice and fall to their deaths down the side of a mountain?" "If I was selling only the east coast corridor traffic (where MCI was almost exclusively in its earliest days) and ignoring the farmers and the small town residence people then I could sell my service at cut rate prices also. Who is kidding who, anyway? ..." Indeed, the old Bell System workers were extremely dedicated. I wish the newcomers would at least learn from the examples of the pioneers. But thanks again for a marvelous story; I know most readers here had not seen it before. By the way, in the {Reader's Digest} version, he had not gone on a plane trip with time to spare and on a whim called Directory Assistance. In their version of the story he had gone back to his old home town to visit long-forgotten school chums, etc and he noticed the town was now on a dial rather than manual system. He picked up the phone, dialed '411' and got the same operator as he had gotten years earlier when it was a manual exchange. Also, he did not ask how to spell the word 'fix', but he asked some other question which triggered the operator's memory from years before, prompting her response about his injured finger. PAT]