31. Trying to connect you.

Key words: Hospital switchboards/operators, PABXs, PMBXs, “Hello girls”, Alexander Graham Bell.

No.31

“You want the On-call Radiographer ? I’ll get him to call you back !”
“Joyce Green Hospital. How can I help you ?”
“Sorry, there are no lines free at the moment”.
“Joyce Green Hospital. How can I help you ?”
“Are you wanting Dr Raj or Dr Dinu ... Patel ?”
“Joyce Green Hospital. How can I help you ?”
“Hold the line please - trying to connect you.”

Recognise them ? The switchboard staff. That small team of people that so many of us used to have almost daily contact with, whose voices were almost as familiar to us our colleagues and yet whose faces we wouldn’t recognise in the street ? Do you remember that friendly operator who acted as an intermediary between you the nervous student nurse, alone on a ward on night duty and the night sister that you felt you needed so urgently. Or that familiar voice that would warn us that they were putting us “through” to Nursing Administration on those rare occasions when we felt that we had no alternative but to “phone in sick”. Those synaptic links, those fountains of knowledge, those conveyors of information, bearers of news and keepers of everyone’s secrets.

Remind me, was the hospital switchboard in the central admin block or was it housed in a section of the porter’s lodge near to the main gate? May be you can remember its exact location because I am certainly struggling to do so right now. But having said that most of us have a clear mental image of a “Joyce” or a “Frank” sitting in front of a hospital switchboard fielding the dozen-and-one calls a minute that seemed to burst into those PABX exchanges throughout the day and night.

Private Automatic Branch Exchanges (PABXs) arrived on the scene for most business premises, government offices and hospitals in 1940 taking over from the old Private Manual Branch Exchanges (the PMBXs) with their bulky switchboards, a battery room and the need for the constant attendance of an operator. However we should perhaps avoid being fooled into thinking that these newer automatic versions were in any sense “hands-free liberators” of switchboard operators because they weren’t !

As far as I can understand the PABXs saw the demise of the old-fashioned boards with their jack-plugs, and their all-too-familiar “cats-cradle” mesh of crossed connection cables but these dedicated “hello-girls” (as they used to be called in the U.S.A) and ‘boys’ too of course were still kept extremely busy.

One switchboard operator recently described her work like this. “There's never a time when the switchboard isn't covered. When I arrive at 8.30 a.m. my colleague, who has been working all night, is waiting to go home.. There are also two part time operators who work from 9.30 - 1.30pm and 1 pm to 5 pm respectively. These peak-time colleagues are a great help particularly when they can relieve me to get on with some of my many administrative tasks. Our telephone network has 13 switches, with 105 lines and more than 9,000 extensions. Most of these are DDI extensions (direct dialling in) and so staff are expected to dial (or to tap out) their own outgoing numbers.

As a switchboard operator you have to be extremely up-to-date all the time particular in relation to where key staff might be (which is sometimes very different from where they are supposed to be) and we obviously try our very best to be conversant about which on-call staff who have asked colleagues “to cover for them” at short notice.

We realise, of course, just how irritating it can be for a caller to be kept holding on waiting for an answer but I can assure you that it's not because we're doing our knitting! Obviously we give priority to outside callers but we often get caught up with staff asking us for information that they could just as easily find out for themselves or with external callers who decide to treat us to their entire medical history when all they really want is to be put through to a Consultant’s secretary !”

Perhaps you have got your own favourite memory of an amusing or serious incident concerning your work at Joyce Green which is linked with an interchange with one of the switchboard operators - if so, why not share the story with the rest of us.

Meanwhile, if you want to check-out how steady your nerves might be if you were ever to find yourself ‘manning’ a telephone switchboard, why not go to this website and put on a set of operator’s headphones for a few minutes ?

http://www.connectedearth/FunandGames/Howdoesaswitchboardwork/index/html

Oh, and in closing, let’s say “Happy Birthday” to Alexander Graham Bell, who managed to produce the first intelligible telephonic conversation on 10 March 1876. It was his birthday today, 3rd March, in 1847.

“H-E-L-L-O ! Oh sorry caller, are you still holding !