way through a whole series of operators, which can
take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on the line while this
complex process is negotiated across the country by the gaggle of
operators. Instead, the caller hangs up, and you call him back
yourself when the call has finally worked its way through.

After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have to
quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the
American 1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else--maybe
two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime.
And this costs money.

In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a very
expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be bad
enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale
proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially
worthwhile.

Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of human
beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years. Phone
"operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all
routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines.
Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less machine-like
nowadays, and have been known to have accents and actual character in
their voices. When you reach a human operator today, the operators are
rather more "human" than they were in Leticia's day--but on the other
hand, human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the
first place.

Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical"
switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into
the phone system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems
are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go
completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today.
Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other
large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than
Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.

But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are
lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. They are much cheaper
to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit
into half the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics
work around the clock and don't have salaries or