True Story

Got this from somewhere, amazing information.

My grandfather worked for the telephone company 45 years. For a long time, his job involved dealing with customers who came in off the street.

In the days of rotary phones, the dialed number was detected by the amount of time it took the dial to return to the resting position. (Number of pulses sent as it made the trip, actually, I believe.)

So one day this woman comes in complaining that every time she dials a number which she knows is the right number, (in her words) "Some hussy comes on there and tells me there's no such number!" This woman was seriously offended by the (recorded, I think, and probably new in those days) suggestion that she was getting the wrong number, when she simply knew it had to be right.

So my grandfather handed her a phone and offered to let her make the call there in the office. The woman snatches the phone and angrily starts dialing her number -- but she's in such a big snit that every time she turns the dial around, she doesn't wait for it to finish; she grabs the dial and forces it back around to the resting position so she can get on with dialing the next number. I'm sure this technique resulted in an enormous time savings to her, probably adding a full five seconds of free time to her life if she did it for every call she made in forty years, but of course it prevented the phone from properly dialing the number since everything was based on the timing for that dial.

My grandfather started to explain this to the woman, but she was enraged and said, "Are you trying to tell me how to dial a phone?" Well, er, yes, ma'am, amazingly phone company employees probably knew a little bit more than you about how to dial a telephone. Not much more, but enough to know that what you were doing would never work. I think the woman finally got fed up and stormed out.