One ringy dingy….
It was on September 1, 1878 that Emma Nutt made history as the world’s very first female telephone operator when she first manned…. er, womanned the switchboard for the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company. While female telephone operators were the norm during the landline phone’s glory days of the 20th Century, it’s a bit surprising to see just how early in the phone’s history that women were actively recruited over men for the role. Apparently, the men who had initially been hired to handle the switchboard were too rude and impatient sounding to courteously perform the job for the phone company’s customers…
Nobody wants to listen to Max, the Time/Life Operator.
Isn’t that the way they say it goes? But let’s forget all that and move along to this week’s Share Your World answers! Questions still being provided on an interim basis by Di from Pensitivity….
The first telephone….
Which of the following could you do without? TV, Computer, Mobile Phone.
Well, I don’t have a mobile phone…. unless you count the thing I have to bring to work with me that acts like a smartphone, but doesn’t have a sim card. And my TV has been shut off for nearly three whole years now. So what does that leave as the answer……..?????????
I may as well move the toilet in here so I never have to leave my computer.
Do you have a lot of old photographs in a box, or did you put them in albums?
I hardly have any real photographs at all. A good chunk of the family photos from back in the day have long since been lost or ruined. Photos I’ve taken, which this blog is peppered with, are almost all in digital format… and the few real photos I have that are worth showing have been scanned to my computer…
Like my awesome bolt of lightning from 1995…
What was the first thing you bought for yourself when you started work?
Who knows? I think my most memorable purchase from 1998, though it was towards the end of the year and about six months after I started working at Mecca, was a Super Nintendo console I bought on clearance for $50…
8 bits more than a video game system actually needed.
My family got the original Nintendo Entertainment System as a Christmas gift in 1987, and it was the sole video game console I had played through the 90’s. The SNES had been introduced in the early part of the decade, and had already made way for the N64 when I made my $50 investment in “upgraded” technology. The Super NES games weren’t bad, but they’re no match for the warm, fuzzy nostalgia I have for the 8-bit games of the original…
This is what a Mario game should look like…
What is the biggest thing you have bought that did not require finance?
The Neon’s replacement, the Sonic….
Not to be confused with Sonic the Hedgehog, which was on the Sega console.
The Gratitude Section Retro Comic…..
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Thanks for joining in again.
The first thing I bought when I started work was the very first Apple computer!
The computers we had in school when I was a kid in the 80’s had to be some of the earlier Apple models. The Apple IIe in particular was in the computer labs all the way through high school for me, and I could actually write some basic programs for it when all was said and done….
I was the first person in my department to have a personal computer – even the departmental office still had typewriters. An undergrad wrote a word processing program for me! So now you know I am older than dirt.
Pigladillos must be closely related to some humans……….the sex over freedom thing. Or some form of that maybe: freedom to have sex, free sex – well, something like that anyway!
Pam
You never heard Mel Gibson scream about how they can take their lives, but they’ll never take our SEX!!!!
that was a good buy we think… and we like the sonic, it’s cool to drive a car with a cross on the nose, perfect target optics we think ;O)
That’s a photo of it before the black plastic thingie under the bumper started dragging the ground. It’s starting to show the indignities of age just like my beloved Neon did…
Love your personalised number plate. I’m not sure the police would be so impressed, though…
What a shame – you tried to take a great photograph of something uniformly brown and there’s a great big scratch on the negative.
If I weren’t so attached to the random (but interesting) plate I’ve had for 22 years, I’d ask if EVL SQRL were available next time I was at the DMV. My license would probably be revoked on the spot on the grounds of insanity…
You must have been in the grocery store photo lab 27 years ago when they decided not to process that “scratch” on the negative….
Snicker, I remember Ernestine welland reminds me of when I had a brief job as an information operator back in 1969. The first day on the job, the shop steward came in, blew a whistle and everyone walked out on strike. The strike was settled quickly but Ma Bell and I were not meant to be a couple and I moved to the West Coast. Boy, those were the days!
Ah, the days of landlines, telephone books and phonebooths. Not to mention long distance charges….