Telephone Operator Quotes

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As for you, Private, if you mention a word of this to anyone, I'll feed you to the cat thing here. Understand?" "Yum," said Mogget. "Yes, sir!" mumbled the telephone operator, his hands shaking as he tried to smother the burning wreckage of his switchboard with a fire blanket.
Garth Nix (Abhorsen (Abhorsen, #3))
Time plays tricks between here and home," said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.
Garth Nix (Abhorsen (Abhorsen, #3))
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important that you get away before your phone bill arrives.
Douglas Adams
Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God.
Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (The Religion of God)
What do you think of Chicago? Well, the telephone operator woke me up today and said, 'Good morning, Miss Lee. It's eight o'clock, and three below zero.
Harper Lee
I almost died. Fortunately, my mother was a nurse. She gave me a shot of something, and things turned out brilliantly.” Lucky me, I thought. Why couldn't his mother have been a telephone operator?
Tiffanie DeBartolo (God-Shaped Hole)
…what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs eventually as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains… and others take their places… but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song.
Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance)
Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers. "The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth--over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows.
Dan Brown
Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war—10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles. Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women.
Cari Beauchamp (Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood)
One annoyance is people’s seeming inability or unwillingness to differentiate between the number zero and the letter “o.” I’ve had conversations with telephone operators who have told me that I can reach my party by dialing, for example, 31o-3o55. Sometimes I’ve asked, “If I follow your instructions, by dialing the letter ‘o’ instead of the number zero, will I reach my party?” They always answer no and that I must dial the zero. Then I ask, “Why did you tell me ‘o’ when you meant zero?” Our chitchat usually degrades after that. It’s not only telephone operators. How many times have you heard a student or teacher say, “He has a 4 point o GPA”? I
Walter E. Williams (American Contempt for Liberty (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 661))
I attempt all day, at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work. I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is what torments me (and doesn't clean the silver).
Lydia Davis (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives. Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5))
Men would pass the long, dark nights thinking of home and dreaming of leave. Samizdat discovered by Russian soldiers on German bodies demonstrates that there were indeed cynics as well as sentimentalists. ‘Christmas’, ran one spoof order, ‘will not take place this year for the following reasons: Joseph has been called up for the army; Mary has joined the Red Cross; Baby Jesus has been sent with other children out into the countryside [to avoid the bombing]; the Three Wise Men could not get visas because they lacked proof of Aryan origin; there will be no star because of the blackout; the shepherds have been made into sentries and the angels have become Blitzmädeln [telephone operators]. Only the donkey is left, and one can’t have Christmas with just a donkey.’ 2
Antony Beevor (Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943)
Can't you clerk in a store?' 'No.' 'Can't you be a waitress?' 'Would you be anything like you're suggesting to me? Then why, if you're too good, is it all right for me?' 'It's not a question of superiority, Dora. Come on, be a telephone operator and get paid while you work. Or how about ushering in a theater? I have it. You'll get a job in a flower shop. They always do.' He looked at her so sharply that she knew she must make some answer, and she began to speak as if her words came from another mind, another mouth. 'I am beyond this plane of animal existence. I'm made of different stuff. I lived all this ages ago and I'm through with it for good.
Margery Latimer
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional big I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. (XIII: The Apollo Flight That Failed)
Telepathy’ literally means to feel at a distance, just as ‘telephone’ is to hear at a distance and ‘television’ is to see at a distance. The word suggests the communication not of thoughts but of feelings, emotions. Around a quarter of all Americans believe they’ve experienced something like telepathy. People who know each other very well, who live together, who are practised in one another’s feeling tones, associations and thinking styles can often anticipate what the partner will say. This is merely the usual five senses plus human empathy, sensitivity and intelligence in operation. It may feel extrasensory, but it’s not at all what’s intended by the word ‘telepathy’. If something like this were ever conclusively demonstrated, it would, I think, have discernible physical causes -perhaps electrical currents in the brain. Pseudoscience, rightly or wrongly labelled, is by no means the same thing as the supernatural, which is by definition something somehow outside of Nature.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
Fascinating to watch the reactions of people suddenly seized by fear. Some can’t take it. They let themselves go to a point of hysteria, then in panic flee to—God knows where. Most take it, with various degrees of courage and coolness. In the lobby tonight: the newspapermen milling around trying to get telephone calls through the one lone operator. Jews excitedly trying to book on the last plane or train. The wildest rumours coming in with every new person that steps through the revolving door from outside, all of us gathering around to listen, believing or disbelieving according to our feelings.
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
The telephone,” he wrote, “may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns.… The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question. The Hoot Owl slogan was “Win Your Bet Without a Fight.” Apparently, in the late evening, people all over Los Angeles did a lot of betting on trivia such as the correct names of the Seven Dwarves. The service got a call every three minutes, adding up to about thirty-five thousand a year. Hoot Owl was a favorite target of conservative groups, who believed it catered to “hippies and other night people.” But the library persisted, and Hoot Owl operated every weeknight until the end of 1976.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century East Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it.
Arthur Phillips (Prague)
An epidemic of measles broke out, and Dr. Moses Greeley Parker worried that if the operators succumbed, they would be hard to replace. He suggested identifying each telephone by number. He also suggested listing the numbers in an alphabetical directory of subscribers.
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5))
If we want to make friends, let’s greet people with animation and enthusiasm. When somebody calls you on the telephone use the same psychology. Say “Hello” in tones that bespeak how pleased YOU are to have the person call. Many companies train their telephone operators to greet all callers in a tone of voice that radiates interest and enthusiasm. The caller feels the company is concerned about them. Let’s remember that when we answer the telephone tomorrow. Showing a genuine interest in others not only wins friends for you, but may develop in its customers a loyalty to your company.
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie: Building Lasting Relationships and Achieving Success (Illustrated))
As I soon learned, this was the dream to which Gene had alluded so often in the past. Interestingly, though he’d said many times before that there might be something in this for me, that day I won a part that had yet to be created. It was only after I’d been brought on board, and Gene and I conceived and created her, that Uhura was born. Many times through the years I’ve referred to Uhura as my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the twenty-third century. Gene and I agreed that she would be a citizen of the United States of Africa. And her name, Uhura, is derived from Uhuru, which is Swahili for “freedom.” According to the “biography” Gene and I developed for my character, Uhura was far more than an intergalactic telephone operator. As head of Communications, she commanded a corps of largely unseen communications technicians, linguists, and other specialists who worked in the bowels of the Enterprise, in the “comm-center.” A linguistics scholar and a top graduate of Starfleet Academy, she was a protégée of Mr. Spock, whom she admired for his daring, his intelligence, his stoicism, and especially his logic. We even had outlined exactly where Uhura had grown up, who her parents were, and why she had been chosen over other candidates for the Enterprise’s five-year mission.
Nichelle Nichols (Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories)
The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else. If one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is, through his activities) one would have to define him as a captive of the organization. Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does. There seems to be very little any one executive can do about it. He cannot, as a rule, like the physician, stick his head out the door and say to the nurse, “I won’t see anybody for the next half hour.” Just at this moment, the executive’s telephone rings, and he has to speak to the company’s best customer or to a high official in the city administration or to his boss—and the next half hour is already gone.*
Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials))
Governments have been operating the infrastructure racket for so long that many people assume we couldn’t have electricity, water, airports, telephones, railroads, gas, subways, waste disposal, or internet without their coercion. All these functions will be better without the threat of violence involved, as is true of all cooperative endeavors.
Adam Kokesh (Freedom!)
A crucial link in the spreading timetable system was public transportation. If workers needed to start their shift by 08:00, the train or bus had to reach the factory gate by 07:55. A few minutes’ delay would lower production and perhaps even lead to the lay-offs of the unfortunate latecomers. In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour. When it was 12:00 in London, it was perhaps 12:20 in Liverpool and 11:50 in Canterbury. Since there were no telephones, no radio or television, and no fast trains
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Mpelelezi wa Tume ya Dunia kutoka Israeli Daniel Yehuda Ben-Asher Ebenezer, Mhebrania aliyeishi Givat Ram, Jerusalem, na mke wake mrembo Hadara na mtoto wake mzuri Navah Ebenezer, alikuwa Ukanda wa Gaza siku alipopigiwa simu na Kiongozi wa Kanda ya Asia-Australia ya Tume ya Dunia U Nanda – kutoka Copenhagen kuhusiana na wito wa haraka wa kuonana na Rais wa Tume ya Dunia. Yehuda aliondoka usiku kwenda Yangon, Myama, ambapo alionana na U Nanda na kupewa maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata. Mbali na maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata, Nanda alimkabidhi Yehuda kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Dickson Santana (bila kujua kama Mandi ni kachero wa Kolonia Santita) ili amsindikize mpaka stendi ya mabasi ya Maubin, nje ya Yangon. Baada ya hapo Yehuda alisafiri mpaka Copenhagen ambapo yeye na wenzake walikabidhiwa Operation Devil Cross, ya kung’oa mizizi ya Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Yehuda alifanya kosa kubwa kuonana na kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Santana! Kwa sababu hiyo, sauti na picha ya Yehuda vilichukuliwa, watu wengi walikufa katika miji ya Copenhagen na Mexico City.
Enock Maregesi
A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
Mr. Leon S. Utter, a former dean of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, has written, “Your selling plan should go into operation as soon as the telephone rings and you are requested to serve a bereaved family.… Never preconceive as to what any family will purchase. You cannot possibly measure the intensity of their emotions, undisclosed insurance, or funds that may have been set aside for funeral expenses.
Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death Revisited)
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives. Douglas
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5))
Clarke remembered having his first experience with global communication when he worked at the Bishops Lydeard Post Office in his teens. “I was night operator for quite a long time at Bishops Lydeard, and one night there was a call from New York—very rare in those days. The call came by radio, of course; it was long before there was any telephonic cable. The operator in Taunton must have detected me listening in, and told me to unplug. I was probably weakening the signal.
Neil McAleer (Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary)
The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.
Tim Weiner (Enemies: A History of the FBI)
As additional precautions, Kranz requested that a two-hundred-foot radio antenna (called a deep-space dish) in Australia be added to the global network tracking and communicating with the spacecraft, and that additional computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland be what he called "cranked up" -- made ready for use. He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. (XIII: The Apollo Flight That Failed)
The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air.… That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. —Senator Frank Church, Chair, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975
Glenn Greenwald (No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State)
Half an hour later the telephone bell began to tinkle and my heart throbbed tumultuously with hope and fear. There came, at the bidding of an operator, a flying squadron of sounds which with an instantaneous speed brought me the words of the telephonist, not those of Françoise whom an inherited timidity and melancholy, when she was brought face to face with any object unknown to her fathers, prevented from approaching a telephone receiver, although she would readily visit a person suffering from a contagious disease.
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
Two things that weren’t even on the agenda survived every upheaval that followed. General Akhtar remained a general until the time he died, and all God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas.
Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes)
Bin Laden practiced intensive operational security. He was wary of telephones. He allowed no Afghans into his personal bodyguard, only Arabs he had known and trusted for many years. He varied his routes, did not stay in any one place for long, and never told anyone but his Arab inner circle about his plans. These practices limited the effectiveness of the CIA’s recruitments because the agency’s sources and paid agents were mainly Afghans who were kept at bay by bin Laden’s core bodyguard and leadership group. The CIA was unable to penetrate the inner circle, but bin Laden did have one security weakness, as agency operatives saw it: his several wives.
Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
One of my students told the class that he worked in a bank in which everybody made note of every action—a telephone call, a calculation, use of a computer, waiting on a customer, etc. There was a standard time for every act, and everybody was rated every day. Some days this man would make a score of 50, next day 260, etc. Everybody was ranked on his score, the lower the score, the higher the rank. Morale was understandably low. “My rate is 155 pieces per day. I can’t come near this figure—and we all have the problem—without turning out a lot of defective items.” She must bury her pride of workmanship to make her quota, or lose pay and maybe also her job. It could well be that with intelligent supervision and help, and with no inherited defects, this operator could produce in a day and with less effort many more good items than her stated rate. Some people in management claim that they have a better plan: dock her for a defective item. This sounds great. Make it clear that this is not the place for mistakes and defective items. Actually, this may be cruel supervision. Who declares an item to be defective? Is it clear to the worker and to the inspector—both of them—what constitutes a defective item? Would it have been declared defective yesterday? Who made the defective item? The worker, or the system? Where is the evidence?
W. Edwards Deming (Out of the Crises)
The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers' cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operated. In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million-the equivalent of $112 million dollars-and gave Iran just £7 million. To make matters worse, it never complied with its commitment under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah to give laborers better pay and more chance for advancement, nor had it built the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, who in 1949 became director of Iran's petroleum institute, was appalled by what he found at Abadan:
Stephen Kinzer (All the Shah's Men)
Two things that weren’t even on the agenda survived every upheaval that followed. General Akhtar remained a general until the time he died, and all God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear: from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from inter-school debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas. In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah who, General Zia convinced himself, spoke only through him. But today, eleven years later, Allah was sending him signs that all pointed to a place so dark, so final, that General Zia wished he could muster up some doubts about the Book. He knew if you didn’t have Jonah’s optimism, the belly of the whale was your final resting place.
Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes)
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy omnibus 2: Tot ziens en bedankt voor de vis / Grotendeels ongevaarlijk / En dan nog iets… (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4-6))
How to Leave the Planet 1. Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it’s very important that you get away as soon as possible. 2. If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House—(202) 456-1414—to have a word on your behalf with the guys at NASA. 3. If you don’t have any friends in the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don’t have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try. 4. If that also fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible. 5. If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it’s vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives. Douglas Adams Los Angeles 1983 and London 1985/1986
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5))
When I was first called as a General Authority, we lived on a very small plot of ground in Utah Valley that we called our farm. We had a cow and a horse and chickens and lots of children. One Saturday, I was to drive to the airport for a flight to a stake conference in California. But the cow was expecting a calf and in trouble. The calf was born, but the cow could not get up. We called the veterinarian, who soon came. He said the cow had swallowed a wire and would not live through the day. I copied the telephone number of the animal by-products company so my wife could call them to come and get the cow as soon as she died. Before I left, we had our family prayer. Our little boy said our prayer. After he had asked Heavenly Father to “bless Daddy in his travels and bless us all,” he then started an earnest plea. He said, “Heavenly Father, please bless Bossy cow so that she will get to be all right.” In California, I told of the incident and said, “He must learn that we do not get everything we pray for just that easily.” There was a lesson to be learned, but it was I who learned it, not my son. When I returned Sunday night, Bossy had “got to be all right.” This process is not reserved for the prophets alone. The gift of the Holy Ghost operates equally with men, women, and even little children. It is within this wondrous gift and power that the spiritual remedy to any problem can be found. “And now, he imparteth his word by angels unto men, yea, not only men but women also. Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times, which confound the wise and the learned” (Alma 32:23).
Boyd K. Packer (Truths Most Worth Knowing)
... - the Age of Anxiety, dating from around August 1945, is twenty three years old this very month - and her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its seas and their tides. But this is worry and it is a little different from anxirty: Particular rather than pervasive, it arrives unannounced, without anxiety's harbingers, dread and forboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry turns up on the door step, the overbearing, passive aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he "won't be any trouble" even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end; as he expropriates the sofa, the bathroom, the contents of the liqour cabinet and cigarette carton, and monopolises the telephone and the ear of anyone within shouting distance. Worry displaces the entire mood, the entire ethos of the house - even if that mood hitherto consisted largely of anxiety - and replaces it with something more substantive, more real than mere mood. You would be mightily pleased to have ordinary anxiety back in residence, for under worry there is no peace whatsoever, not even the peace of cynicism, pessimism or despair. Even when the rest of the world is abed, worry is awake, plundering the kitchen cupboards, raiding the refrigerator, playing the hifi, watching the late show until the national anthem closes the broadcast day; then noisily treading the halls, standing in your bedroom door, wondering if by any chance you are still up (knowing that of course you are), breathing and casting its shadow upon you, the silhouette of its slope-shouldered hulk and towering black wings.
Robert Clark (Love Among the Ruins)
In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?" Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice? Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy- minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one
William James (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking)
rang. “Hello,” said the editor. “London calling,” came the voice of the operator. “All right,” replied the editor. He recognized the voice of Terry Masters, special correspondent. His voice came clearly over the transatlantic telephone. “The Horror is attacking London in force,” he said. “There are thousands of them and they have completely surrounded the city. All roads are blocked. The government declared the city under martial rule a quarter of an hour ago and efforts are being made to prepare for resistance against the enemy.” “Just a second,” the editor shouted into the transmitter. He touched a button on his desk and in a moment an answering buzz told him he was in communication with the press-room. “Stop the presses!” he yelled into the speaking tube. “Get ready for a new front make-up!” “O.K.,” came faintly through the tube, and the editor turned back to the phone. “Now let’s have it,” he said, and the voice at the London end of the wire droned on, telling the story that in another half hour was read by a world which shuddered in cold fear even as it scanned the glaring headlines. * * * * “Woods,” said the editor of the Press to a reporter, “run over and talk to Dr. Silas White. He phoned me to send someone. Something about this Horror business.” Henry Woods rose from his chair without a word and walked from the office. As he passed the wire machine it was tapping out, with a maddeningly methodical slowness, the story of the fall of London. Only half an hour before it had rapped forth the flashes concerning the attack on Paris and Berlin. He passed out of the building into a street that was swarming with terrified humanity. Six months of terror, of numerous mysterious deaths, of villages blotted out, had set the world on edge. Now with London in possession of the Horror and Paris and Berlin fighting hopelessly for their lives, the entire population of the world was half insane with fright. Exhorters on street corners enlarged upon the end of the world, asking that the people prepare
Clifford D. Simak (The Fourth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®: Clifford D. Simak)
When I returned from the restroom and Jase saw how much I was bleeding, he began to grill the doctor with every question imaginable. She remained completely stoic, no matter what he said. Every time he asked her a question, she provided the same measured response: “I will not know until I begin to operate.” She began trying to offer various common medical possibilities for this incident, such as a ruptured cyst and other diagnoses. Jase shot down every explanation with the power and speed he would use to blast a duck out of the sky with a shotgun. He was never disrespectful toward her, but he was intense. Due to the pain I was experiencing, I did not realize exactly what was going on, but I did know I was lying on the bed while the doctor and my husband were in a Western movie standoff on either side of me. These two strong personalities were about to collide, and I was in the direct line of fire! At one point, the telephone in my pre-op room rang. Without saying a word, the doctor picked up the phone, stretched it across my bed, and handed it to Jase, never taking her eyes off his. To say that one could cut the tension in the room with a knife is a complete understatement. I was not happy about Jase’s confrontational manner, but at the same time, I was grateful that he was asking the questions I never thought to ask and telling the doctor exactly how he wanted her to treat me. “Like your own daughter,” he said. Jase clearly communicated that he wanted the doctor to rectify the situation. He went on to tell her, “You better not start taking out a bunch of things that need to be left inside of her. I understand that you have to operate, but do not remove anything that does not have to come out.” She confirmed her understanding of his expectations and left the room. “Jason,” I said, using his full name, “she is my boss.” I hated the thought that he might say something to offend her, something that might make my working for her difficult or awkward in the future. “I don’t care,” Jase said, “my main concern is you. I am about to send you back into that operating room with her, and I want to make sure she knows my expectations are high.
Missy Robertson (Blessed, Blessed ... Blessed: The Untold Story of Our Family's Fight to Love Hard, Stay Strong, and Keep the Faith When Life Can't Be Fixed)
At first, they joked about it but as they became more detoxed and more assertive from therapy, paid ironically by the husbands, they began to realize that they each had unique strengths and powers and a burning desire for revenge. Between the Three Wise Women they had an IT expert, an actress and a supermodel, all very wealthy and beautiful. All the three men’s’ brains appeared to reside in their pants and they wondered if they set a honey trap could it possibly work. A plan was proposed by Felicity and she called it Operation Devastation. Angelina would hack into their MIS computer systems, bug their telephones, offices, cars and homes. Ava would seduce Ryan, who owned Novels and the computer firm, Angelina’s husband in a honey trap and get it all on DVD for the divorce court. Then Ava would seduce Felicity’s husband, James, the Irish footballer. Finally, Sean who was Felicity’s friend who was an out of work actor would seduce Patrick
Annette J. Dunlea
Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama’s presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government’s most closely held secrets. Deciphering the archive and the NSA’s language
Glenn Greenwald (No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State)
Szot changed the all-too-familiar call-to-action line, “Operators are waiting, please call now,” to, “If operators are busy, please call again.” On the face of it, the change appears foolhardy. After all, the message seems to convey that potential customers might have to waste their time dialing and redialing the toll-free number until they finally reach a sales representative. Yet, that surface view underestimates the power of the principle of social proof: When people are uncertain about a course of action, they tend to look outside themselves and to other people around them to guide their decisions and actions. In the Colleen Szot example, consider the kind of mental image likely to be generated when you hear “operators are waiting”: scores of bored phone representatives filing their nails, clipping their coupons, or twiddling their thumbs while they wait by their silent telephones—an image indicative of low demand and poor sales.
Noah J. Goldstein (Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive)
At the end of 1996, the five most valuable companies in the world were General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, the Coca-Cola Company, NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone), and ExxonMobil—traditional industrial and consumer companies that relied on massive economies of scale and decades of branding to drive their value. Just twenty-one years later, in the fourth quarter of 2017, the list looked very different: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. That’s a remarkable shift. Indeed, while Apple and Microsoft were already prominent companies at the end of 1996, Amazon was still a privately held start-up, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still a pair of graduate students at Stanford who were two years away from founding Google, and Mark Zuckerberg was still looking forward to his bar mitzvah. So what happened? The Networked Age happened, that’s what. Technology now connects all of us in ways that were unthinkable to our ancestors. Over two billion people now carry smartphones (many of them made by Apple, or using Google’s Android operating system) that keep them constantly connected to the global network of everything. At any time, those people can find almost any information in the world (Google), buy almost any product in the world (Amazon/ Alibaba), or communicate with almost any other human in the world (Facebook/ WhatsApp/ Instagram/ WeChat). In this highly connected world, more companies than ever are able to tap into network effects to generate outsize growth and profits.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
We live, whether we know it or not, simultaneously upon two levels of consciousness—the outward and the inward, the physical and the spiritual. Only a few people in the history of the world, I imagine, have achieved a whole self, integrated, with absolute freedom from discouragement, and with a serenity which is complete both inside and out. Only a few have been able to divorce themselves from anxiety, sorrow and responsibility—as well as joy—and to remove from their consciousness all the frustrations, limitations, disappointments and worries implicit in life upon earth. Every person I have ever known, however rooted in marvelous trust in God—with which some are born and others win with difficulty and frequent backsliding—is often cast down, has dark moods and desperate hours. I am many times discouraged, mainly about myself and my failures in endeavors or relationships, or about people I love who are going through something hard to endure. Therefore, on the surface, which is where we at least appear to live during our waking hours, I am often as unquiet as the February day. Few escape; and in the black hours it seems useless to tell ourselves—however true—that this, too, will pass; that this is also a lesson to be learned. It will, and it is; but there are moments when words are just words without more than the dictionary meaning. One thing is certain: if we can alter the circumstance which threatens to defeat us, that is our responsibility; if we cannot, and know it is God's will, we can, however unhappily, accept it. Sometimes I feel that I'm mistreated; that I have waited too long for the telephone which didn't ring, the letter which didn't come; that I have suffered too many vigils during the nights and days when someone I loved lay critically ill or upon an operating table. Yet, in recent years, I know—as truly as I know I am breathing at this very moment—I have achieved an inner quietude which is undisturbed by the procession of outer events. I have learned painfully, if not wholly, to retreat within this fortress when matters go wrong beyond any remedial measure of my own, past any effort I can make, and beyond my comprehension as well. This is the lull in the February storm, the gentling of the wind, the essential safety, warmth and the breaking through the light.
Faith Baldwin (Testament of Trust)
In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question.
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
This, however, is not the case. The load on a generating system depends on many variable factors. Among these are the fluctuating industrial demand; emergencies which may remove a part of the system from operation; and even passing clouds, which may make tens of thousands of offices and homes turn on their electric lights in the middle of the day. It follows that the automatic stations, as well as those operated by a working crew, must be within constant reach of the load dispatcher, who must be able to give orders to his machines; and this he does by sending appropriately coded signals to the power station, either over a special line designed for the purpose, or over existing telegraph or telephone lines, or over a carrier system making use of the power lines themselves. On the other hand, before the load dispatcher can give his orders intelligently, he must be acquainted with the state of affairs at the generating station. In particular, he must know whether the orders he has given have been executed, or have been held up through some failure in the equipment. Thus the machines in the generating station must be able to send return messages to the load dispatcher. Here, then, is one instance of language emanating from man and directed toward the machine, and vice versa.
Norbert Wiener (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science))
I put down the phone and finished lighting the cigarette. The blue cover of the script caught my eye. I picked up the telephone again. I gave the operator Tony Moroni’s home number
Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers)
The Buppet, like the turtle back suit, is something we've spoken of previously, for instance in a "Dust Control” article. The Buppet (contraction of “Body Puppet”) is really a telephone booth sized upright personal cab(in) within which the shirt-sleeved operator directly controls manipulator arms and either “legs," tracks, or wheels.
Peter Kokh (A Pioneer's Guide to Living on the Moon (Pioneer's Guide Series Book 1))
Almost at once the telephone call came, ordering him to stand by. That evening, the phone rang again in the railroad station waiting room where he had set up his office. “The invasion begins tomorrow, 4:50 A.M.” Thus the Second World War began. Nobody, least of all Erwin Rommel, could foresee that the military operations that began on September 1, heralded by a ranting and self-justificatory Reichstag speech by the Führer, would inexorably involve one country after another; would last six years; would leave 40 million dead and all Europe and half Asia ravaged by fire and explosives; would destroy Hitler’s Reich, ruin the British Empire and end with the creation of new weapons, new world powers and a new lawlessness in international affairs.
David Irving (THE TRAIL OF THE FOX The Search for the True Field Marshall)
Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
Privatisation of government-owned enterprises is crucial to the project [neoliberalism]. One of the appealing features of tax cuts for neoliberal governments is that reduced revenue provides them with an excuse to sell state assets to meet the sudden budget shortfalls. The sale of state assets creates more lucrative business opportunities for the corporations that can afford to buy such things as power stations, water treatment plants, telecommunications providers, government banks and airlines. It's something of a windfall for a business to acquire an asset that will always deliver a return so long as citizens still need things like water or power supplied to their homes, a bus to catch from one place to another, or a telephone connection. And - unlike a state-owned asset - a private corporation never has to adjust its services due to democratic prompting from the electorate. Why do power prices keep going up across Australia? Because most of the power supply is now owned and operated by private corporations. They're free to price gouge on the supply of an essential service, because they can't be voted out of office. p.58-9
Sally McManus (On Fairness)
Privatisation of government-owned enterprises is crucial to the project [neoliberalism]. One of the appealing features of tax cuts for neoliberal governments is that reduced revenue provides them with an excuse to sell state assets to meet the sudden budget shortfalls. The sale of state assets creates more lucrative business opportunities for the corporations that can afford to buy such things as power stations, water treatment plants, telecommunications providers, government banks and airlines. It's something of a windfall for a business to acquire an asset that will always deliver a return so long as citizens still need things like water or power supplied to their homes, a bus to catch from one place to another, or a telephone connection. And - unlike a state-owned asset - a private corporation never has to adjust its services due to democratic prompting from the electorate. Why do power prices keep going up across Australia? Because most of the power supply is now owned and operated by private corporations. They're free to price gouge on the supply of an essential service, because they can't be voted out of office.
Sally McManus (On Fairness)
In 1920, Ellen’s family moved into a triple decker, or three-story multifamily home, in Dorchester, a clear sign of upward mobility. Mary entered the white-collar workforce as a stenographer in a grocery store, while Daniel worked as an elevator operator at a telephone company. John became a schoolteacher in a Boston grammar school.
Cristina Viviana Groeger (The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston)
Pervitin became a sensation,” one psychologist reported. “It soon gained acceptance in a very wide range of circles; students used it as a survival strategy for the exertions of exams; telephone switchboard operators and nurses swallowed it to get through the night shift, and people doing difficult physical or mental labor used it to improve their performance.
Norman Ohler (Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich)
Doxing has come to be classified as a form of violence, in and of itself. What's mildly amusing is that, prior to the internet, most Americans doxed themselves. Home addresses and telephone numbers were listed in the phone book, annually distributed to every local home for free. Phone customers were charged a monthly fee if they didn't want their home number included in the directory. And possession of the physical directory wasn't even necessary. It was possible to dial the telephone operator and request an immediate con- nection to almost anyone's home phone, without consent. All that was needed was the spelling of the person's last name and an educated guess as to the area code in which they lived. How did something once considered a normal extension of establishing residence become a disturbing act of aggression, during a decade when crime statistically decreased? The explanation is twofold. The first is that the early internet was built around anonymity. It was populated by people known only by their fabricated screen names, interacting with anonymous strangers they knew nothing about. This established a new expectation of confidentiality, where it was assumed everyone had the inherent right to say or do whatever they wanted online, without those words or actions impinging on life in the real world.
Chuck Klosterman
Thanks to time differentials and good telephone service, the world money market, unlike stock exchanges, race tracks, and gambling casinos, practically never closes. London opens an hour after the Continent (or did until February 1968, when Britain adopted Continental time), New York five (now six) hours after that, San Francisco three hours after that, and then Tokyo gets under way about the time San Francisco closes. Only a need for sleep or a lack of money need halt the operations of a really hopelessly addicted plunger anywhere.
John Brooks (Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street)
Damning documentation of LSD experimentation should not have been left in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. On January 31, 1973, one day before retiring from the CIA, Helms destroyed files on the fates of minds shattered over the previous ten years. Helms supported the mind-altering projects—Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operations Mknaomi, Mkultra and Mkdelta. By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, Army Intelligence and U.S. Chemical Corps launched covert operations that seemed necessary. U.S. agents were able to destroy any reputation by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional response, temporary or permanent insanity, encouraging suicide, erasing memory, inventing double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolonging lapses of memory, teaching racism and hatred against specific groups, causing subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assuring that no memory remains of their assignments. The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from a distance, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit. While pure LSD is typically 160 micrograms, the CIA issued 1,600 micrograms. Some of the LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University, who already had wired electrodes in their brain. Was insanity an occupational disease in the music industry? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that took place place in 1967-68 could be altered radically and halted?
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
Another scenario is possible, and that is the e-book will succeed and that books will be downloaded from the Internet. But at the same time, it may be the case that the digital network and the terminals that tap into it will become saturated as limits to growth of computer memory and speed of operation are reached at the same time that electronic traffic becomes gridlocked with e-mail and World Wide Web use. If that were to happen, there would likely be pressure to keep older books in print form, and perhaps even continue to issue newer books that way, rather than clutter the Internet with more and more information. Under such a scenario, older books might not be allowed to circulate because so few copies of each title will have survived the great CD digital dispersal, leaving printed editions that will be as rare as manuscript codices are today. In spite of potential problems, the electronic book, which promises to be all books to all people, is seen by some visionaries as central to any scenario of the future. But what if some electromagnetic catastrophe or a mad computer hacker were to destroy the total electronic memory of central libraries? Curious old printed editions of dead books would have to be disinterred from book cemeteries and re-scanned. But in scanning rare works into electronic form, surviving books might have to be used in a library's stacks, the entrance to which might have to be as closely guarded as that to Fort Knox. The continuing evolution of the bookshelf would have to involve the wiring of bookstacks for computer terminal use. Since volumes might be electronically chained to their section in the stacks, it is also likely that libraries would have to install desks on the front of all cases so that portable computers and portable scanners could be used to transcribe books within a telephone wire's or computer cable's reach of where they were permanently kept. The aisles in a bookstack would most likely have to be altered also to provide seating before the desks, and in time at least some of the infrastructure associated with the information superhighway might begin again to resemble that of a medieval library located in the tower of a monastery at the top of a narrow mountain road.
Petroski, Henry
The Andy Griffith Show was anachronistic. The denizens of Mayberry wore clothing of uncertain vintage and hair of indeterminate style and drove cars of unspecified age. Scant mention was made of current affairs or changing times. Telephone calls were placed through a human operator, and no one seemed to own a television set.
Daniel de Visé (Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American)
Another judgment I made early in the game and enforced through the years was that there would be no pay telephones, no jukeboxes, no vending machines of any kind in McDonald’s restaurants. Many times operators have been tempted by the side income some of these machines offer, and they have questioned my decision. But I’ve stood firm. All of those things create unproductive traffic in a store and encourage loitering that can disrupt your customers. This would downgrade the family image we wanted to create for McDonald’s. Furthermore, in some areas the vending machines were controlled by the crime syndicate, and I wanted no part of that. Our
Ray Kroc (Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's)
In the formative years of digital computing, following World War II, both the operating system and applications were considered afterthoughts by designers. The “hardware” of electronics, as distinct from the “software” of programs, was so difficult that engineers could hardly see past it. The most important type of hardware was the circuitry or processors that actually carried out the instructions given the computer. A second set of devices made it possible to get data into and out of a computer. A third class stored information. A fourth class allowed one computer to send information to another, over special cable or telephone lines. The question of software generally arose only after the hardware pieces fell into place.
G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
Concurrent with the decline of manufacturing, the latter half of the twentieth century oversaw another shift. While earlier office technologies had supplemented workers and increased demand for them, the development of the microprocessor and computing technologies began to replace semiskilled service workers in many areas – for example, telephone operators and secretaries.20 The roboticisation of services is now gathering steam, with over 150,000 professional service robots sold in the past fifteen years.21 Under particular threat have been ‘routine’ jobs – jobs that can be codified into a series of steps. These are tasks that computers are perfectly suited to accomplish once a programmer has created the appropriate software, leading to a drastic reduction in the numbers of routine manual and cognitive jobs over the past four decades.22 The result has been a polarisation of the labour market, since many middle-wage, mid-skilled jobs are routine, and therefore subject to automation.23 Across both North America and Western Europe, the labour market is now characterised by a predominance of workers in low-skilled, low-wage manual and service jobs (for example, fast-food, retail, transport, hospitality and warehouse workers), along with a smaller number of workers in high-skilled, high-wage, non-routine cognitive jobs.24
Nick Srnicek (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work)
Motorcycle or Trike Instruction Permit and Endorsement –These allow you to operate a motorcycle or a three-wheeled motorcycle-based vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Motorcycle Operator Manual or the Sidecar/Trike Operator Manual, available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Commercial Driver Instruction Permit (CDIP) and Commercial Driver License (CDL) –These allow you to operate a commercial vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Commercial Driver Guide available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Getting Your License You can get an instruction permit or a driver license at our driver licensing offices. We have more than 60 locations statewide. Some offices don’t offer testing, so before you come in, be sure the one you plan to visit offers the testing you need. Visit our website or check the Government section of the telephone book under “Licensing, Department of” for the office nearest you. To get an instruction permit, you must: • be at least 15-1/2 years old. • pass the knowledge test and the vision and medical screenings. • pay a $20 permit fee. If you are under 18, you must also bring your parent or guardian with you when you apply. He or she must show proof of identity and proof of relationship to you and must also sign a Parental Authorization Affidavit. When last names are different, we require more documents proving relationship. The permit is valid for one year and you can only renew it once3
Anonymous
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Alex Payne
The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air.… That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. —Senator Frank Church, Chair, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975
Anonymous
The constant needle and edge in their working relationship is matched by a cloak of secrecy the warring offices throw around their rival operations. Diana had to use all her guile to tease out information from her husband’s office before she flew to Pakistan on her first major solo overseas tour last year. She was due to stopover in Oman where Prince Charles was trying to woo the Sultan to win funding for an architectural college. Curious by nature, Diana wanted to know more but realized that a direct approach to Prince Charles or his senior advisers would receive a dusty response. Instead she penned a short memo to the Prince’s private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard and asking innocently if there was anything in the way of briefing notes she needed for the short stopover in Oman. The result was that, as she was travelling on official Foreign Office business, the Prince was forced to reveal his hand. In this milieu of sullen suspicion, secrecy is a necessary and constant companion. Caution is her watchword. There are plenty of eyes and ears as well as police video cameras to catch the sound of a voice raised in anger or the sight of an unfamiliar visitor. Tongues wag and stories circulate with electrifying efficiency. It is why, when she was learning about her bulimic condition, she hid books on the subject from prying eyes. She dare not bring home tapes from her astrology readings nor read the satirical magazine Private Eye with its wickedly accurate portrayal of her husband in case it attracts unfavourable comment. The telephone is her lifeline, spending hours chatting to friends: “Sorry about the noise, I was trying to get my tiara on,” she told one disconcerted friend.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
Although Disney World established the state’s first 911 emergency telephone system, all calls went to company switchboard operators, who decided whether to call the sheriff or to handle the emergency internally, by notifying only company security or emergency personnel.
David Koenig (Realityland: True-Life Adventures at Walt Disney World)
By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery’s Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked—electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. The had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles go cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week.
Stephen E. Ambrose (The Victors : Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II)
Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations—perhaps a university and a telephone carrier, say, or a telephone carrier contracted to a university. The networks carry networks. One
Andrew Blum (Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet)
He came to me with this operation and I provided a great deal of the money and logistics for it. You can call him to check if you like, but we don’t have much time thanks to your errors, and if you think about it for a minute you’ll see that the only other way I’d know to call this number at this time, or the fact you’re travelling under the name Frederick Collins, or that you’re holding Hope Charamba and her son in a flat just off the central square in Vällingby, would be if your operation was entirely blown, in which case I doubt we’d be chatting on the telephone, don’t you?
Jeremy Duns (Spy Out the Land)
In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour. When it was 12:00 in London, it was perhaps 12:20 in Liverpool and 11:50 in Canterbury. Since there were no telephones, no radio or television, and no fast trains – who could know, and who cared?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Ramakrishna Paramhans Ward, PO mangal nagar, Katni, [M.P.] 2nd Floor, Above KBZ Pay Centre, between 65 & 66 street, Manawhari Road Mandalay, Myanmar Phone +95 9972107002 1. Study Organizations in Myanmar: A Growing Demand for survey companies in Myanmar is a Southeast Asian nation steeped in culture and history. Over the past ten years, it has undergone rapid economic growth and modernization. This development has made an expanding market for different administrations, including statistical surveying. Businesses in Myanmar benefit greatly from the assistance of survey firms in comprehending consumer behavior, market trends, and the landscape of competition. Among the main players in this field is AMT Statistical surveying, an organization known for its complete administrations and neighborhood skill. The Role of survey companies in Myanmar Businesses wishing to establish or expand their presence in this dynamic market must conduct market research in Myanmar. Myanmar, which has a population of over 54 million people, presents significant opportunities for businesses operating in a variety of industries, including tourism, finance, consumer goods, and telecommunications. However, the market also faces unique obstacles like a diverse ethnic landscape, varying degrees of economic development across regions, and a regulatory environment that is constantly shifting. By providing insights into consumer preferences, purchasing patterns, and market dynamics, survey companies assist businesses in navigating these complexities. To get accurate and relevant data, they use a variety of methods, such as observational studies, qualitative interviews, focus groups, and quantitative surveys. Driving Overview Organizations in Myanmar A few overview organizations work in Myanmar, each offering a scope of administrations custom-made to address the issues of various clients. AMT Market Research stands out among these due to its extensive experience and thorough comprehension of the local market. AMT Statistical surveying AMT Statistical surveying is a noticeable player in Myanmar's statistical surveying industry. Surveys of customers' satisfaction, market research, brand health monitoring, and other services are all offered by the business. AMT's group of experienced scientists and examiners influence their neighborhood information and skill to convey noteworthy bits of knowledge for organizations. AMT Statistical surveying uses a blend of customary and current information assortment techniques. Depending on the research objectives and target audience, they conduct in-person interviews, telephone surveys, and online surveys. Their methodology guarantees top notch information assortment, even in remote and difficult to-arrive at areas of Myanmar. Myanmar Advertising Exploration and Advancement (MMRD) Laid out in 1992, MMRD is one of the most established statistical surveying firms in Myanmar. The organization offers an extensive variety of examination administrations, including market passage studies, contender investigation, and financial investigations. MMRD has gained notoriety for its intensive and solid exploration, making it a confided in accomplice for both neighborhood and worldwide organizations. Boondocks Myanmar Exploration Boondocks Myanmar Exploration is one more outstanding player on the lookout. The organization represents considerable authority in giving experiences into Myanmar's advancing business sector scene. Their administrations incorporate area explicit exploration, purchaser conduct studies, and effect evaluations. Wilderness Myanmar Exploration is known for its inventive philosophies and capacity to adjust to the quickly changing economic situations. Understanding Myanmar Understanding Myanmar is a somewhat new participant in the statistical surveying industry however has rapidly earned respect for its excellent exploration and client-driven approach.
survey companies in Myanmar
By early 2014 there were sufficient indications that the High Court action would prove extraordinary by Irish legal standards. It had emerged that a telephone system that handled emergency calls, which had been installed in garda stations across Ireland in the 1980s, had a recording function. Such a recording function posed fundamental problems at a garda station–not least for some conversations between gardaí, which should have been treated as confidential. This system with a recording function was discontinued in November 2013. The garda commissioner at the time, Martin Callinan, had alerted the Department of Justice in March 2014 to the fact that the recording system had been in place. So seriously was the matter taken that it was immediately brought to the attention of Taoiseach Enda Kenny and discussed at a full Cabinet meeting on 25 March. By that time, the retirement of Commissioner Callinan had been confirmed in the wake of the controversy over the treatment of the so-called garda ‘whistle-blower’ Maurice McCabe. Bandon Garda Station, the centre of the du Plantier murder investigation, had such a telephone recording system and it had been in operation between 1997 and 2003–critical periods for the du Plantier investigation.
Ralph Riegel (A Dream of Death: How Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s Dream Became a Nightmare and a West Cork Village Became the Centre of Ireland’s Most Notorious Unsolved Murder)
Coming up the stairway was Antonio Bujia. Eban Abbott peered at him. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” “To the bridge. I called you through the telephone and speaking tube and got no answer. Everything is running good. But we cannot stay down there much longer.” The two men looked at each other. Wisps of smoke were drifting around the staircase. “Go back and stand by. I’ll go to the bridge,” said Abbott. With those few words he changed his whole future; he would regret them all his life. Shocked and disoriented though Abbott still was by Captain Wilmott’s death, he had been moving, albeit slowly and in a roundabout way, down toward the engine room. If he had been challenged about his movements, he could defend himself by pointing out that, as chief engineer, it was also his job to ascertain the extent of the fire so that he could organize the water supplies accordingly. But Bujia had brought Abbott head on with the reality of the situation: the engine room, in his assistant’s estimation, had shortly to be abandoned. There was only one course of action open to Eban Abbott. It was to go down to check out the situation himself. Abbott was charged with the responsibility to ensure that the men in the engine room performed their duties fully in operating the fire pumps, lights, and power to steer the ship through the growing crisis. He abandoned this responsibility when he ordered Bujia back down below and rapidly climbed to the safety of the open deck.
Gordon Thomas (Shipwreck: The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle)
In his speeches in the 1950s, Shannon seemed to make the point that he was not necessarily interested in automated machines per se. He was interested in how machines interact with other machines (as in the telephone switching system) and how they interact with human operators (as in a chess machine). In the latter instance, there was a psychological aspect that seemed curious to him: “We hope that research in the design of game playing machines will lead to insights in the manner of operation of the human brain.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
review some fundamentals: 1. We must continue doing our best to control expenses. Every dollar we save on expenses goes directly to the bottom line. That is what all of us should be concerned about, or you are at the wrong firm. Expenses should be watched at all times, but especially when business is good. 2. We must continue to be alert for scams and con artists. We must watch for unusual behavior by the people we work with. What is unusual behavior? Something subtle like somebody who drives a Rolls-Royce on a salary that can barely support roller skates. 3. Do the people you work with answer phone calls in a courteous manner? Are all phone calls returned? I couldn’t care less what a person does in his own home, but I am a nut about returning phone calls that are made to our personnel during the workday. I do not care if the caller is selling malaria. Calls must be returned! 4. Are the receptionists and telephone operators in all of our offices warm and courteous, and if they are, are they thanked appropriately? Remember that in most cases the first contact a client has with us is through a telephone operator or receptionist. 5. Do you and your associates leave word where you are at all times so that finding you is not like hunting for the Andrea Doria? 6.
Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)
Pierce was thinking about the New York fair around the same time that a modest display of Bell Labs innovations was being demonstrated at Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, which was being marked by the construction of a huge “space needle” on the city’s fairgrounds. At the Seattle fair visitors could ride a monorail to a Bell exhibit intimating a future of startling convenience: phones with speedy touch-tone buttons (which would soon replace dials), direct long-distance calling (which would soon replace operators), and rapid electronic switching (which would soon be powered by transistors). A visitor could also try something called a portable “pager,” a big, blocky device that could alert doctors and other busy professionals when they received urgent calls.2 New York’s fair would dwarf Seattle’s. The crowds were expected to be immense—probably somewhere around 50 or 60 million people in total. Pierce and David’s 1961 memo recommended a number of exhibits: “personal hand-carried telephones,” “business letters in machine-readable form, transmitted by wire,” “information retrieval from a distant computer-automated library,” and “satellite and space communications.” By the time the fair opened in April 1964, though, the Bell System exhibits, housed in a huge white cantilevered building nicknamed the “floating wing,” described a more conservative future than the one Pierce and David had envisioned.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
From ‘Kokor Hekkus the Killing Machine’, Chapter IV of The Demon Princes, by Caril Carphen (Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega): If Malagate the Woe can be characterized by the single word ‘grim’ and Howard Alan Treesong by ‘incomprehensible’, then Lens Larque, Viole Falushe and Kokor Hekkus all lay claim to the word ‘fantastic’. Which one exceeds the other two in ‘fantasy’? It is an amusing if profitless speculation. Consider Viole Falushe’s Palace of Love, Lens Larque’s monument, the vast and incredible outrages Kokor Hekkus has visited upon humanity: such extravagances are impossible to comprehend, let alone compare. It is fair to say, however, that Kokor Hekkus has captured the popular imagination with his grotesque and eerie humor. Let us listen to what he has to say in an abstract from the famous telephoned address, The Theory and Practice of Terror, to the students of Cervantes University: “… To produce the maximum effect, one must identify and intensify those basic dreads already existing within the subject. It is a mistake to regard the fear of death as the most extreme fear. I find a dozen other types to be more poignant, such as: The fear of inability to protect a cherished dependent. The fear of disesteem. The fear of noisome contact. The fear of being made afraid. “My goal is to produce a ‘nightmare’ quality of fright, and to maintain it over an appreciable duration. A nightmare is the result of the under-mind exploring its most sensitive areas, and so serves as an index for the operator. Once an apparently sensitive area is located the operator to the best of his ingenuity employs means to emphasize, to dramatize this fear, then augment it by orders of magnitude. If the subject fears heights, the operator takes him to the base of a tall cliff, attaches him to a slender, obviously fragile or frayed cord and slowly raises him up the face of the cliff, not too far and not too close to the face. Scale must be emphasized, together with the tantalizing but infeasible possibility of clinging to the vertical surface. The lifting mechanism should be arranged to falter and jerk. To intensify claustrophobic dread the subject is conveyed into a pit or excavation, inserted head-foremost into a narrow and constricted tunnel which slants downward, and occasionally changes direction by sharp and cramping angles. Whereupon the pit or excavation is filled and subject must proceed ahead, for the most part in a downward direction.
Jack Vance (Demon Princes (Demon Princes #1-5))
Ten years later, merely by adding additional digits to be dialed, the Dutch engineer in the resistance had applied complexity theory to covert operations by creating theoretical pathways through the switching gear, thus enabling resistance fighters to call others without knowing whom they called, or even the actual telephone numbers they were calling.
Tom Clancy (The Bear and the Dragon (John Clark, #3; Jack Ryan Universe, #11))
A few stations, starting with one owned by AT&T, started broadcasting messages for advertisers. Within a couple of years, AT&T’s broadcast activities had become far more professional. Baseball games and highlights, news reports, music, and other forms of entertainment soon made their way onto the air. AT&T, as the nation’s telephone company, owned an advanced wiring system that enabled small and distant radio broadcasters nationwide to pick up programming from hundreds of miles away—with this, a small station in Maine could pick up a signal from Washington DC via a wire and broadcast the signal to a local audience. Rather than have countless stations develop their own expensive programming, AT&T’s primary station, WEAF, allowed other local stations to broadcast a programming block. With its national infrastructure and early entry into broadcast advertising, AT&T’s national broadcast operation was profitable.
Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
Pitt suddenly remembered something. "I'd like the use of a telephone." "Sorry, not possible." "Mind if I ask why?" "Have you forgotten you're supposed to be dead?" Alice asked matter-of-factly. "One phone call to a friend or a lover and you could blow the entire operation." "Yes, 'The slip of a lip may sink a ship,'" Pitt said cynically. "Look, I need some information from a total stranger. I'll hand him a phony name." "Sorry, not possible." A scratched phonograph record came to Pitt's mind. "Give me a phone or I'll do something nasty." She looked at him quizzically. "Like what?" "Go home," he said simply. "Mr. Brogan's orders. You're not to leave the building until your flight to our camp in San Salvador. He'd have you in a straightjacket before you reached the front door.
Clive Cussler (Cyclops (Dirk Pitt, #8))
Pitt flashed his best politician's smile and said, "I beg your pardon, may I borrow your phone?" "If you work here, you know that using an unauthorized phone is against agency regulations." "Then I'm safe," said Pitt. "I don't work here." "You'll never get an outside line," said old White Hair. "Watch me." "Pitt picked up the phone and asked the operator for Martin Brogan's office. In a few seconds Brogan's private secretary came on the line. "My name is Dirk Pitt. Please inform Mr. Brogan that if I don't get the use of a telephone in one minute I'm going to cause a terrible scene." "Who is this?" "I told you.
Clive Cussler (Cyclops (Dirk Pitt, #8))
Muldoon referred to an invention that Menlo Parker was currently working on, designing a miniaturized portable radio-telephone which the Omega operatives could carry on their person at all times, and by which they could always get in touch with one another, and also tap into the public phone lines to contact the police, fire department, or ambulance. The invention was by no means yet perfected.
Lin Carter (Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown, in The earth-shaker: A case from the files of Omega)
but I did hear some things about his speech that I think bear repeating: 1. He is a strong believer that people who talk too much seem to have bad luck. 2. People who do not return phone calls promptly do not seem to make the grade at a highly profitable firm. 3. People who object to end runs will never make it in football, or with successful investment banking firms. Certain groups do need to observe a “chain of command” atmosphere, but highly motivated, intelligent people do not need this handcuff. 4. A firm that has enthusiastic receptionists and telephone operators starts off with a tremendous advantage over the dummies of the world. Keep in mind that the first impression people receive from Bear Stearns is with those associates. 5. If a business person has to ask his accounting department if he is making a profit, he will not be in business very long.
Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)
Eve taught me to look at the overall picture, to read the cards as art and intuition as much as a science. Women were more in touch with that innate sense than men. Women resonated with the cards. Rather than read the cards in order, I let the entire pattern seep in. I understood the 8 of Clubs and the Ace of Spades. The Queen of Diamonds, I sensed, would be a real person to provide the essentials of life. Then my heart sank when I saw the two Jacks, the Pretenders, the Liars who would upset my balance on the one hand, and try to exert power over me on the other. They framed the 2 of hearts. The Jacks would jeopardize my love life. I’d have to be wary in that domain. It had been quite a while since I had taken a lover. With this news, I would wait. I’d return to New York City, and meet two people who would be my Ace and my Queen. I took the calendar from the wall near the telephone, and sat down on Nestor’s chair. I stared at it, unbelieving; it had been six months since Nestor’s passing. I had spent half a year sorting through Nestor’s things, working, making no new friends, and taking no lovers. I had performed my duties, including marking the calendar mechanically. I operated in a daze. Several people had asked me if they could help. I didn’t understand, but now I knew. I had lost all sense of time and of myself, and I needed to rejoin life. My nineteenth birthday was just six months away. I would stay in Key West until then. In the interim, I would decide what I wanted to keep from Nestor’s legacy and, as he wished, place the rest.
Robin Ader (Lovers' Tarot)
Over the next 50 years, Vail’s organization—eventually called the Bell Telephone Laboratories—produced the transistor, the solar cell, the CCD chip (used inside every digital camera), the first continuously operating laser, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and eight Nobel Prizes. Vail created the most successful industrial research lab in history, and AT&T grew into the country’s largest business.
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
Vail similarly stayed out of the details of the technical program. Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
These are beliefs passed on from generation to generation, the so-called “sins of the fathers.” Again, I refer to Alice Miller, who cites examples of such beliefs: 1. A feeling of duty produces love. 2. Hatred can be done away with by forbidding it. 3. Parents deserve respect because they are parents. (Note: Any 15-year-old can be a parent without any training. We give telephone operators more training than parents. We need telephone operators, but we need good parents more.) [Emphasis mine.] 4. Children are undeserving of respect simply because they are children. 5. Obedience makes a child strong. 6. A high degree of self-esteem is harmful. 7. A low-degree of self-esteem makes a person altruistic. 8. Tenderness (doting) is harmful. 9. Responding to a child’s needs is wrong. 10. Severity and coldness toward a child give him a good preparation for life. 11. A pretense of gratitude is better than honest ingratitude. 12. The way you behave is more important than the way you really are. 13. Neither parents nor God would survive being offended. 14. The body is something dirty and disgusting. 15. Strong feelings are harmful. 16. Parents are creatures free of drives and guilt. 17. Parents are always right.3 Probably no modern parents embody all of the above. In fact, some have accepted and imposed the opposite extreme of these beliefs with results just as abusive. But most of these beliefs are carried unconsciously and are activated in times of stress and crisis. The fact is, parents have little choice about such beliefs until they have worked through and clarified their relationships with their own parents.
John Bradshaw (Bradshaw On: The Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem)