For '411' Operators, Job Security Is a 911

By ESTHER SCHRADER

Dec. 26, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ANAHEIM —

The calls come in every 21 seconds, and you’re falling behind if you don’t answer each one. “Hello, this is Rad, what city?” you, or somebody like you, says 1,100 times a day.

You and the other 300 directory assistance operators around you don’t have your own desks. It’s a different station every day, and even the name you use on the phone is a pseudonym. So you perch photos of your kids on the keyboard in the mornings, then lift them off when you go home.

The children are smiling up at you. They are the reason you stand the sore fingers, the cracked voice, the relentless calls 7 1/2 hours a day, five days a week, and the strange feeling of isolation and loneliness in a roomful of people.

Even as your hands skate over the keyboard, searching out the numbers for Satin Scissors in Torrance, Mission Carpet Cleaning in San Diego, Party City in Tustin, your free ear is keen to the rumors around you: You are becoming an anachronism, you hear. In this age of Internet white pages, CD-ROM phone directories and voice recognition technology, you are going out of date.

“So many companies are . . . doing this all by computer, we all sit here waiting for the ax to drop,” said Cindi Perrine, 46, a directory assistance operator for 28 years who uses the name “Rad” on the job and carries a pocket computer game in her purse to ease the monotony.

“For now, we’re live, not Memorex,” Perrine said. “But it’s like, this kind of service is something left over from the past.”

Over the last four years, the world of directory assistance has undergone a transformation as profound as any in its 45-year history. Pacific Bell, once a monopoly in California, is fighting to compete in a world where numbers and names are increasingly available in more ways than one.

In three high-tech offices in Anaheim, San Diego and Culver City, “411” operators search the company’s vast, ever-changing databases for numbers in six area codes stretching from the Mexican border to Simi Valley.

Pacific Bell has cut its directory assistance operators from 2,500 to 1,800 in Southern California, and from 4,500 to 3,600 statewide. Each operator handles about 1,100 calls a day, more than twice as many as a year ago.

At the same time, the company is relying on faster computers and growing automation. Under huge digital clocks that scream the hours, minutes and seconds in red, directory assistance operators are turning into the blacksmiths of the telecommunications world--once essential, now nearly obsolete.

Once, when directory assistance was simply called “information,” it was bestowed by women with one-ringy-dingy voices and encyclopedic knowledge of their towns. In those days before the computer age and the breakup of AT&T; in 1984, operators perched on high stools, pulling thick cords in and out of huge switchboards with one hand, and flipping through heavy bound directories for numbers with the other.

Today the stools are gone, and so are the switchboards. Operators feel increasingly robbed of the nourishment of human contact, the ability to chat, if even for a brief moment, with strangers on the phone.

“It’s sad, the lack of contact with people,” said Judi Lioacono, 51, who is in her 29th year of giving information. “I think that’s important to our society. We need more personal contact with people, not less. Nobody can get anybody anymore. You call a bank, you can’t get a person. It’s everywhere. People are really hurting to talk to a real person.”

Nevertheless, directory assistance is one of the few places left where going to work can make you feel part of a wider community.

On Super Bowl Sunday, hundreds of calls come in asking for the number for Domino’s Pizza. During earthquakes, the sick, the lonely and the elderly call in seeking someone to talk to, to reassure them. On Thanksgiving, people call asking where they can find a recipe for turkey.

On Mondays after holidays, the lines fill up, as people return to their jobs. Mother’s Day is the busiest day for directory assistance operators in Southern California, with people jamming the lines seeking the number of local florists, candy stores and gift shops--not to mention calls to Mother.

“If you stop and think how many people I talk to in a day, sometimes it really makes me proud,” Perrine said. “I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of human white pages that people can go to when they don’t want to open the book.”

Pacific Bell officials say they have no intention of doing away with live directory assistance operators any time soon. But they acknowledge that as they and other former subsidiaries of AT&T; struggle to keep down the cost of directory assistance--long a money-losing but much demanded service--today’s 411 operators work faster and talk to callers less than they used to.

“Directory assistance is the telephone company equivalent of the production line, and like production lines, new technology is intruding on the old ways of doing things, on the old identity of the operator as information giver,” said Phil Cashia, a professor of communications at USC, who worked for Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, the precursor of Pacific Bell.

“It’s hard on operators, but the fact of the matter is that technology over time will replace the human being in that operation. This whole lifestyle is on its way out.”

Telephone operators’ work has been rigorous since the first switchboard came on line in 1878. Long-distance operators, the best-trained and best-paid in the operator hierarchy, have relatively varied jobs that ease the tedium. But for directory assistance operators--the bottom of the telephone company heap, according to the union that represents operators--the job has always been particularly demanding.

“Flip, sweep and scan” was the work mantra in the 1950s, when the directory assistance job was created. Before, operators both found numbers and helped place calls. Until the mid-1970s, information for directory assistance came from huge volumes updated every day. Operators would flip open the heavy books, sweep through the letters, then scan the tiny type with a magnifying glass and a ruler.

In the late ‘70s, the whir of microfiche replaced the books, but there was still time for operators scrolling through the plastic sheets to chat with customers. And while supervisors walked, and sometimes roller-skated, up and down the rows exhorting operators to work faster, it was easy to slow down a bit when you were tired. Unless you slacked off completely, no one would know.

As late as 1996, the directory assistance operators worked in dozens of small offices scattered around the Southland, taking queries only from the areas immediately around them, getting to know the places, and sometimes the callers, they were responsible for.

“In the old days, we’d do a lot more. We could help you with anything. If you had a problem, we’d try to find you the best place to call to solve it,” said Carole Sullivan, who started as an operator in 1959. Soon after, “directory assistance” split off from operators, who help people place calls.

“Now, it’s not that we don’t want to help,” Sullivan said. “It’s just that we have so many more customers, we just don’t have the time.”

Sullivan didn’t become an operator to work fast. She didn’t become an operator to move up the career ladder. She was lured by the pay--now $7.70 an hour to start, and $16.60 an hour in four years, the benefits and a job that, unlike the factory, where some of her relatives work, didn’t turn her into a widget.

She liked the tiny conversations she had with hundreds of people a day, and still likes the challenge of keeping her voice steady and calm no matter how worried she is about something at home, how angry she is at her teenager, or how down she is about her health.

But these days there is no letup.

Although private directory assistance services have encroached on Pacific Bell’s former monopoly, the phone company giant still provides information to about 14 million of the 17 million telephone customers in Southern California.

Inside the beige-colored buildings, their locations kept secret because of frequent bomb threats, operators flash an indicator light to go to the bathroom so supervisors can ask someone to take their calls. Wearing Walkmans to ease the boredom is not allowed. Note-taking is frowned on.

Supervisors on platforms at the center and sides of the room choreograph who works where when, in an intricate dance meant to assure that just enough operators are working at any one time to handle the calls coming in. With operators working around the clock in staggered shifts that begin and end every 15 minutes, there is no room for every operator to have a permanent desk.

Since spring, technology has made it possible for supervisors to know exactly how many calls each operator is taking every minute of the day.

The numbers are unforgiving. More than a million calls a day from six area codes. Twenty-one seconds the average amount of time to complete calls that operators just last year handled in more than 30 seconds. That time is expected to drop to 18 seconds within six months.

With the speed come mistakes. Zach Terflinger, 25, said it’s hard to avoid giving the occasional wrong number when you have only a few seconds to type abbreviated names into a database. And although Terflinger said he is familiar with frequently requested numbers in Orange County, where he lives, he is often flummoxed these days by callers asking for numbers in places he’s never heard of.

“I’ve seen people cry when they get off their shift, because a customer yelled at them they’re so upset,” said Terflinger, who started as a 411 operator at 18.

“I’ve had customers call and scream at the top of their lungs because they got the wrong number,” he said. “The fact is, sometimes I do give out wrong numbers. It’s easy to do.”

On the other side of the room on a recent day, one woman used colored markers to doodle and practice her handwriting while taking a flurry of calls. Hugh Benton, who met his wife on the job and who still drives with her to work each day, said he tests himself on how fast he can handle each call and still “be nice.”

Not all the changes in operators’ lives are bad. Since spring, adjustable desks crank up or down, adjustable chairs make working less of a strain, and keyboards have a lighter touch and tilt. If operators get tired of repeating the same greeting over and over again, they can make a recording of themselves and play it to callers, then jump onto the line a few seconds later to listen to the reply.

Gone are the dress codes that once called for the then all-woman work force to work in skirts and pumps, and the very real mandate against hiring men. Today 20% of directory assistance operators are men. And both men and women dress as they like, slouching in sweats, hunching over their keyboards in jeans or sitting cross-legged, baseball caps low over their eyes.

On a recent rainy day, signs posted on pillars and bulletin boards in Greer’s office reminded operators to give people looking for sandbags the number for their local fire station. Twelve people called in asking about ski conditions in the Sierra. A child wanted to know the capital of Afghanistan, and another asked an operator in a tiny voice how to spell “terrible.”

As the clocks above them tick by the hours and minutes and seconds of their days, operators say they spend a lot of time worrying about what will happen to the jobs they always thought were as steady as they come. But no matter how fast the operators get, they fear they can’t type fast enough to keep up with the future.

“Oh, it’s coming,” said Mark Leslie, who started with Pacific Bell 26 years ago as a directory assistance operator fresh out of high school--the second man to do so--and rose to the rank of vice president of external affairs for the company’s Orange County operation.

“Sometimes I sit here and think: What will it be like when they’re not here anymore?”

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411 Facts

While the number of daily directory assistance calls has dropped, there are also fewer opeators to handle the volume:

Workload

Average daily calls to Southern California directory assistance:

1993: 1,294,111

1994: 1,171,146

1995: 1,111,573

1996: 1,054,000*

1997: 1,080,000*

* estimate