I Miss the Operator
Recently, I was reading a book of essays by E.B. White (author of Charlotte’s Web and other children’s books, as well as an excellent essayist). In one essay, he lamented that in his small town in Maine, the rotary phone was replacing the old operator system. Now everyone had to remember numbers rather than simply picking up the handpiece and talking to the operator. Under the old system, he said, there was always a comforting voice at the other end of the line, immediately available, to connect you with someone else, figure out what to do in case of an emergency, even dispense advice. The operator knew everyone, and generally knew what was going on. A human connection was going away with the advent of the rotary phone.
Rotary phones were already rare when I was growing up — all the phones were push button. But we still had an operator. You could still dial zero and get a voice, who would find a number for you or connect you to emergency services if necessary. There was always someone on the other side of the line that you could reach out to. I was wondering what would happen if you dialed zero now, so I — no, I did not initially dial zero, but I looked it up on the internet. Since this is 2025, I got an AI overview. Here is what it told me: “When you dial zero today, nothing specific happens on a phone line, as operator and directory assistance has been phased out by many providers. On modern landlines or mobile phones, dialing zero likely results in a message indicating the service is unavailable, directs you to a different number for customer service, or provides instructions to use online resources instead.” Then of course I had to try it for myself. What happens when you dial zero from a mobile phone? Sure enough, you get a message: “The service you are trying to use has been restricted or is unavailable.” That is the operator’s sad requiem.
Will I sound old and ridiculous (I am not that old, but am willing to take “ridiculous”) when I say that I am sad to see good things passing away and being replaced by things that, while convenient, are somehow not as satisfying? Like film for photographs. I used to take photos on my mother’s old Minolta camera. They are filed in a photo box with older photos that my mother took, and even older photos that her mother took. I’ve also taken a lot of photos on my phone camera. They are in iCloud, and at some point I really should print them out, right? But do we? Print them out, I mean. If we remember, but we often don’t.
Somehow, when we can take so many photos, each one means less. Now that we carry our phones around with us all the time, we seldom make calls. We carry televisions around in our pockets, yet the shows don’t affect our culture the way they used to. In all of these instances, we have lost little bits of human connection.
There are ways in which our lives in 2025 are easier and wealther than they used to be. And yet, I remember when we had something we don’t seem to have anymore. Didn’t we have more time? Things took longer — you could not order from Amazon and had to find whatever it was you wanted at the store, or order it by phone and wait for it to arrive. I still remember calling catalog companies and ordering by phone from a sales clerk. Is that even possible anymore? And yet I don’t remember life being as rushed, even ten years ago, as it is now. I don’t remember this sense that everything is happening too quickly, that no one knows what will happen next year, or the next financial quarter. Will you lose your job to AI? Who knows.
Sometimes I take refuge from the pace of the present by retreating into the past. Today I am still spending time in Maine with E.B. White, but also looking through What Shall I Wear? by Claire McCardell and reading The Brownie and the Princess, a collection of stories by Louisa May Alcott. So parts of my brain are in the 1950s, parts are roaming through various points from the 1930s to the 1970s, and parts are all the way back in the 19th century. All of these books give me a different sense of time — different, I mean, from our time. It goes most slowly in Alcott, where people walk or ride horses or drive carriages to get around. But you can feel it even in White’s motor cars and McCardell’s trains from New York to the countryside. Everything is slower.
Not too long ago, we had movements that attempted to recapture a slower sense of time. Movements may be too glorified a term — I’m thinking of Cottagecore, Forest Girl, Dark Academia. We still have BookTok, which is at least focused on the much slower pleasure of reading. And I still remember, from the 1990s, the allure of Shabby Chic. I would call my own decorating a mixture of Mission Style and Shabby Chic. Shabby Mission, as it were–which means that I love old oak, and pick it up from the side of the road or carry it home from Goodwill. Somehow, these movements seem to have gone away, and we are all in a moment where time is speeding up. We are so afraid of it that celebrities are literally trying to stop its passage by purchasing new faces. At least, their new faces don’t look much like their old faces. It seems as though, despite various books on Wabi Sabi, our culture is afraid of the old, the imperfect, the temporal. We do not value the things that take time.
I don’t know about you, but the speed at which our society is moving gives me a sense of nausea, like motion sickness, and a fear of being permanently behind. I will literally never catch up on my emails.
I don’t think we can get the operator back. But I will have to think about what to do in my own life to slow down a bit, to make sure my feet are on the ground. I really should knit something. I really should paint something. I’m already writing something (by hand, as I always do with fiction and poetry). In the midst of the storm, I need to catch my breath. I bet you do too, so breathe, and then do something that allows you to feel time passing.
(The image is Telephone Operator by Gerrit A. Beneker.)
