Hey Did You Get My Text?
That is the message of the modern day but actually, not even that long ago, some people and businesses used answering services to take their calls and messages.
Yup, and that was my very first job at probably one of the last answering service operations. I sat in a room all by myself in a building downtown and answered other people's phone calls. There were hundreds of phone lines and any of those could ring at any time.
EVEN EMERGENCY calls for ambulances. We answered those too! It always sent the operator's heart racing when the LOUD alarm sounded for those calls.
Each phone line had to be answered differently and eventually the operators memorized the phrases to say for each phone line. There were businesses like after hours plumbers, delivery services like a diaper service, personal residences, and doctors or lawyers. If the diaper service got a call we would say, Nana's Diaper Service Exchange. And that word exchange let the caller know they reached the answering service. This is the X in PBX. It stood for Phone Board [X] Exchange.
So even back then there was an X messaging platform.
This photo was in the earlier days of PBX operators
During really busy periods of the shift an operator might answer 40 calls in an hour. We would plug in to the phone line and quickly say the proper business name followed by "Can You Hold Please". For some lines, like a doctor's line, we had to wait for the caller to say yes or NO in case it was an emergency.
Most doctors had to have an answering service at that time in case there was an emergency at the hospital. The operators had to discern whether the caller had a real emergency or could wait till the doctor checked in at his given time.
We wrote down a caller's name, call back number, the time of the call and what the message was.
Neat handwriting was a requirement for this job because the next shift might have to read your messages.
We put the slips of paper into the cubbies of a wooden box of slots with the customer names.
Some businesses had set hours for the answering service to take over such as during lunch hour, 12-1:00pm, and after business hours . If someone had an emergency like a broken pipe when the business was closed we would call the business owner or person on call right away. Otherwise someone would call in the mornings to pick up messages.
Doctors would call us every few hours to update us with the phone number where they could be reached for emergencies -No Cell Phones back then-. There were "beepers" during this later time period. These devices would be called by the answering service and a signal would get sent to the device causing it to BEEP and that let the doctor know he had an important call holding.
We got to know the customers pretty well. Some doctors were not the friendlist and if an emergency call wasn't actually and emergency, Oh Boy!, we might get a big telling off. Others doctors were fun. I remember regularly chatting with one doctor who was funny and he would tell me about things going on at the hospital or other amusing side stories.
About those ambulance calls....
Back then there was not the 911 emergency number.
When the ambulance line rang we took the call. Immediately a phone number of the caller was written down, then location, then type of emergency. There were specific phrases for types of emergencies. Like "man down" "woman down" - for an unknown cause of the problem. The term "51-50 " was used to communicate a mental health issue.
And yes... it was possible for an operator to listen in to a call between parties, but that would probably get the operator fired. Once a call was put through the callers would generally listen for the click sound of the operator switching off the call and then start their conversation. Sometimes callers would say "thank you operator" as the cue for an operator to close the line.
The reason answering services were still around when I was young was due mainly to the doctors, ambulance calls and after hours businesses like plumbers.
This was a fun job. You could get to know a lot of people and learn all about stuff going on. Eventually I starting talking to people at the places I thought I might want to work. I ended up getting a job at one of the local hospitals this way.
When I started working at the hospital I got to meet or see most of the doctors I had been talking to ... that was really funny to put the real faces to the telephone personalities I had gotten to know. But thats another story...
When Do You Think Answering Services Faded Off The Scene?
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