Capitol Telecommunications: Oral History Interviews (Senate Historical Office, 2006)

The Senate switchboard is covered from eleven at night to six in the morning. Most of the six people interviewed here started in the 1970s in Dirksen SD-180, working a cord board that took the in-house calls while consoles handled the ones from outside. Kramer remembers the staffing: "We had 50 girls when we came." Sartori remembers the cord board as the better instrument: "Your hands were always moving with those cords."

The night rotation runs across several pages of the transcript: three weeks with Tuesday and Wednesday off, three weeks with Thursday and Friday, then a weekend with a day thrown in on the Monday. Voice mail, when it came, "helped a little, but then when it gets full it's back to square one again." The toll-free number changed more. "Business changed when special interest groups started buying 800 numbers that would feed into our switchboard. So maybe before if they were paying for it they thought twice before calling us." A caller who expected a recording at that hour is audibly surprised to get a person: "Oh, a live person!" Each interviewee signed a deed of gift placing the transcript in the public domain.