PBX

ALWAYS a pushover for gadgets, we investigated the new College switch- board the other day, and found it tucked away just to the left of the Inn's front door, in the room formerly devoted to overflow customers of the Gift Shop. It's a shiny, fascinating object, about the size and shape of a well-developed upright piano, and twinkling with colored lights and draped with little green rubber hoses through which talk is squirted at the rate of several thousand calls a day.

The College board, or PBX, used to be a one-girl show behind the Inn desk, but surveys by the telephone people and the mounting irritation of academic users in- dicated that two and a half girls were really needed to handle the College and Inn communications problems and that more privacy was desirable, presumably so that the half girl wouldn't be conspicu- ous. Two operators are now on duty from nine to four every week day.

The board was "cut over" on a Monday morning in August, at which time every phone in the College got a new number. Since it was a fairly slack time, little con- fusion resulted, although the new num- bers don't have anywhere near the pleas- ant feel of the old ones, when the Dean was one-one-one and the Admissions Of- fice was the same as our number at home.

Nine trunk lines feed into the College from the Hanover exchange, so that when you call "30" you may actually be getting anything up to "38". There is provision on the board for 660 extension lines, al- though there aren't that many in opera- tion right now. The first 140 numbers are for the Inn, the lowest College number being 142 (Great Issues) and the highest, 628 (the Greenhouse). The busiest line is the uperintendent of Buildings (especially on mornings when the steam pressure is low), and the least busy is the President's "hideaway" which isn't listed. The Chemistry department talks most of the faculty, and the German department least. Anybody who likes telephones is glad we have so many.