I often if not always tell the story of my working life as the heartwarming rags-to-riches tale of the boy who left the seminary, got a job in the entertainment industry as a secretary, and retired 17 years later (for health reasons) as a facilities, logistics, and infrastructure vice president. And while that is true, what I leave out is that before the glitz and glamor of my Hollywood adventure, I was a telephone operator for two months at Pacific Bell, or PacBell as it was called. PacBell was what was known as a “Baby Bell,” the result of the “Bell System Breakup” – the breakup of AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) in the 1980s into regional companies, considered one of the most significant antitrust actions in American business history.
The Bell System Breakup transformed the structure of the telecommunications industry by ending AT&T’s near-monopoly over telephone service in the United States and creating a group of regional companies known as the “Baby Bells.” Pacific Telesis was the holding company for PacBell’s California interests, with PacBell and Nevada Bell (which PacBell had owned since 1913) as its operating companies.
My plan had been to get in on the ground floor of this behemoth and make a career out of it. I figured the telephone wasn’t going away anytime soon, and while I didn’t want to be connecting calls and looking up phone numbers for the rest of my life, “operator” was the entry-level position; once you’d done your time there, you had multiple career paths, with internal on-the-job training opportunities ranging from labor-intensive (but high salaried) positions such as installer (yes, phones used to have to be physically installed at your home; it’s what today we’d call a “land line” – can’t you just see me showing up at your door wearing a toolbelt?) to any number of “management” tracks, from customer billing to scheduling and maintaining the fleet of automobiles used by installers and technicians (I knew someone who did just that).
The problem was I wasn’t a very good operator! The job was a customer-facing “service” position, one in which I was expected to “help” you make your call, look up a phone number for you, and the like. I have a very low tolerance for idiots, and this came to the fore once I’d completed my training and was “on the floor” taking calls from the public.
We were located on the second floor of a large building in Van Nuys – rows and rows of cubicles, each with a computer terminal and a headset – about 200 of us. A shift, which for reasons that never became clear to me was known as a “trick,” consisted of eight hours of relentless phone calls from John Q. Public wanting the number for Domino’s and one moron who tried to order a pizza directly from me: he kept asking, over and over, “can’t you just call them and order it?” and I kept offering to connect him to them. He persisted, so I connected him to a nursery school in Encino.
It quickly became apparent that I had neither the temperament nor the demeanor for “customer service”-type work. Unbeknownst to me, a supervisor had been monitoring my calls because they’d received several complaints from customers who called back in (all you had to do was dial 0 on your phone) to report a rude operator. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have asked that guy “does it hurt to be so stupid?” when he asked me to connect him to “the girl I met yesterday in the Appliances Department at Sears;” but I still wonder, to this day, if his stupidity caused him physical discomfort.
So when I got called in to see the supervisor Randi Bell (I know! Ironic right?), I figured the gig was up. She said, “you need to have a good long think about whether you want a career here,” and I immediately responded with the impulsivity of youth, “there’s no need for me to waste time thinking about it… I don’t,” and walked out of her office.
Now, we can argue semantics, but sat here today I still maintain she did not fire me… I quit. Six months later I landed my job at Larson Sound Center (the preeminent independent postproduction studio in Hollywood which, at the time – 1990 – was working on the majority of primetime television being broadcast); Larson was acquired by Pacifica Media Affiliates, who kept me on as an IT manager, and Pacifica was acquired by Technicolor who made me a vice president. The rest is history.
“one ringy dingy… [laugh snort] …two ringy dingies…”
So now you know the truth. For a brief while lost to the mists of time, I was Ernestine, the obnoxious telephone operator from the TV show “Laugh-In” who wielded the power of the phone company as adroitly as any bitchy queen would. I watched “Laugh-In” religiously as a boy with my mom and dad. It was my mom’s favorite show.
It may even be where I got the idea for my first job. One ringy dingy… A gracious hello…
