We'll have more Takeaway in just a moment. Melissa Harris-Perry: Hold on, stay with me. Then, if you didn't hang up and look it up in your own book, an operator would finally come on and assist you. They actually put a recorded message on their information line that said, "Look it up in your own book," and then there was silence for about 8 to 10 seconds. One of the examples of a telephone company that tried to stop this practice was in Washington, D.C. They would call information and say, "Hey, what's this number?" rather than looking in the book themself. In fact, one of the things that they pointed out is that a lot of people were, in their minds, just too lazy to look up the number themselves. By the 1970s, the telephone companies were trying really hard to get people not to use directory assistance. You can imagine the number of operators who were employed to answer these calls. Not only were these information calls, directory assistance calls a burden for the telephone companies, they received, in some cities, a million a day. It turns out, though, that it was hugely expensive for the telephone companies to provide information services, which became directory assistance because it was free.įor most of the 20th century, anyone could call and ask for the information, and there were no limits to the numbers of times that you could call. He used to work with so-and-so, who owns the grocery." Operators would answer all these questions that callers would provide for them.Įventually, that became very specialized, and the telephone companies had their own operators who were designated information operators, who would take the calls and would presumably give just telephone numbers. You could call, and operators were used to giving time and weather, but they would also get all kinds of questions about recipes, where somebody lived in the neighborhood, and they would give very vague information about relationships, "This is someone's cousin. Josh Lauer: 411 really was just for telephone numbers at the end, but, again, telephone information used to be anything. Melissa Harris-Perry: Now you just say, "Hey, Siri," or, "Hey, Alexa," and ask all kinds of questions and presumably get some kind of answer, but it really is quite different than the kind of presumably specialized knowledge that we got from calling 411. This process became automated later on in the end of the 20th century, obviously, and we probably weren't going to call and talk to an operator anymore, but the 411 code still existed to get directory assistance. As you mentioned, an operator would actually pick up and would be on the other side of that call looking through directories and giving you the information. Since telephone directories were published semi-annually or annually, the numbers were out of date quickly, people moved, and so there were good reasons to actually have to call for directory assistance. As you mentioned, in the before times, before the internet, if you wanted a phone number, the only way to get it was either you had it or you looked in the telephone directory. Early on, in the early part of the 20th century, information was that catch-all, where you could call an operator, and they would give you time of day, give you directions, tell you where to find things around town, but that particular service became specialized and became information for phone numbers only. You mentioned information, but it became the specific number for just getting phone numbers. Josh Lauer: 411 was the calling code for directory assistance. Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about what 411 was and how it came into being. Here with me is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Josh Lauer. When you dialed, an actual human being would answer the call and answer questions about everything from business locations to movie showtimes. I'm old enough to remember the before times, before the internet, when, if you had a question, all you needed to do was dial 411. Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway.
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