Looking Back to the Days of Rotary Phones and Phone Operators

Most everyone has a story about how they met their spouse. Most are very interesting. I will touch on that subject today on how I met mine. Not that it is any more or less interesting than any other stories, but it centers on something that would be almost impossible to duplicate today even if I wanted to. The reason is because it centers on a long time past that only us old seniors experienced, and youngsters know nothing or very little about.

So here is the story.

My job back in the day was to call people and collect past due payments on their loans. Most of the calls were long distance calls. At that time, you had to use the operator to make long distance calls; you could not just dial them like we do now. I used a rotary dial telephone, dialed 0 for the operator, and they would make the call for you. It would be what they called a person to person call and the operator would ask for the person you wanted to speak to.

Well I made so many of these calls every night that after a while I got to recognize the operators by their voices. Most were very nice, but there was one voice that was very pleasant and also interesting, and maybe a little enticing to me. Well, it seems she began to recognize me also when I called and sometimes we would make a few remarks while we were waiting for the person to be called to the phone. We got to where we started to make a few interesting remarks back and forth with maybe a little bit of flirting going on here and there, which was frowned on by the night supervisor so things became a little risky on her part.

As things progressed, if I dialed the operator and she did not answer I would hang up and redial until she answered. The other operators finally caught on to this and I would hear them say, “It's your boyfriend, you take the call”. This was great news for me! This went on for around a year. My office was only a block away from the telephone office and I told her I walked by your office today with my assistant. She said, “I think I may have seen you. Were you the fat one or the other one." I said, “The other one”. I said, "I would like to meet you sometime." She said, “I would like to meet you also, but I do have a boyfriend.” Well that didn’t bother me; I just saw that as a challenge.

Well, in those days you couldn’t just call someone and get a hold of them. If you called someone and they weren’t home, there was no answering machines; no blinking red light that notified you that you missed a call…. You just missed it. So that became another factor that played in this scenario. If you knew what a person’s car looked like, you would leave a note to them under their windshield wiper. On a call, I asked her what kind of car she drove and she told me. Ok, this was exciting news that I was poised to take advantage of.

So it began!

I would leave a note on her car asking her to meet me. Well, one day I intended to leave her a note with when and where to meet. With note in hand, I headed for her car and, in what involved a stroke of luck, I saw that there was already a note under her windshield wiper. So I lifted the wiper to put my note under it and somehow the other note (it was from her boyfriend) fell out and onto the ground. I picked it up and decided there really was only room for one note. The other note somehow got lost in the shuffle……. Well it is too late to say to make a long story short, so the note snitching went on for a couple of months and things progressed after a couple of dates and strangely enough, she never received any more notes from that boyfriend again.

We ended up falling for each other and got married just a couple of months later. When I tell my friends this story they usually say, “Wow you were a stalker.” I just say, “Call it what you want, but it worked.” When I told my wife about it at a later date, she just said, “I knew about it."

You just can’t hide things from them, they always know somehow.

Thought for the day: When I see lovers names carved on trees, I think it strange how many people bring sharp knives on dates.