Switchboard operator

Medium-to-large organizations often employ switchboard operators—specialised staff who answer general telephone calls to the organization and usually maintain internal communication through telephones, and pagers.

In hospitals, "switchboard" can also have duties in dealing with medical emergency (when announced on the telephone), disasters and resuscitation calls.

In the early days of telephony, through roughly the 1960s, companies used manual telephone switchboards and switchboard operators connected each call by inserting a pair of phone plugs into the appropriate jacks. Each pair of plugs was part of a cord circuit with a switch associated that let the operator participate in the call. Each jack had a light above it that lit when the telephone receiver was lifted (the earliest systems required a generator on the phone to be cranked by hand). Lines from the central office were usually arranged along the bottom row. Before the advent of direct distance dialing, switchboard operators would work with their counterparts in the central office to complete long distance calls.

A note: in the United States of America, any switchboard operator employed by an independently owned public telephone company which has not more than seven hundred and fifty stations is excluded from the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

See also

* Attendant console
* Private branch exchange
* Telephone switchboard
* Telephone operator