A Year in the Life
of a Czech Plush Monkey. |
His final Week 56: 6 - 9 Feb. 2005 |
Sunday, 6th These are Opice's antique telephones. He has 2: one to phone and the other to answer. They used to be connected between the attic and the basement when he was a kid. The last pix shows the inside telephone magneto that makes electricity to ring the bells and power the line when he turns the crank. (There also used to be 2 huge cylinder batteries inside the bottom box.) |
Talk among yourselves! |
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Monday, 7th A trip to Roseville's Telephone Museum and (for comparison's sake) to SureWest Telephone/ Video/Internet/et .al. Monkey demonstrates how the operator used to connect callers. The operator would sit attentively until the board signaled someone wished to make a call. Then Ernestine the Operator would say, "A gracious hello. Is this the party to whom I am speaking?" |
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Tuesday, 8th Inside each cylinder is a mechanical switcher capable of "dialing" one digit of a fon#. Clickity-clickity-clickity-chunk it used to go to register a "4." It took at least 11 cylinders for one long distance number so the Fon Co. had to have thousands and thousands of these units chattering loudly day & night to keep the customers chatting yackity-yackity. |
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Today the technology is more like these pictures show. No noise, no moving parts, and so microminiaturized a single circuit board can handle zillions of calls. And instead of cooper wire, many SureWest customers are wireless and/or connected via glass fiber with laser beams. | |
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Monkey studies one small section of panels teaming with zeros and ones streaming across the computerized network. "If I pull enough of these thingama-bobbers out, will the machine sing 'Daisy Daisy' for me as all the telephone computers slowly die? |
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It's now the Year of the Chicken;
however, Monkey won't completely retire. From time to time this website will be updated with Xtra Out-of-Time Adventures. Opice still has many places to visit and endless things to do. Please check back. |
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Clarification Opice doesn't post what he knows, because Not that Opice's insights as a member of the Czech plush animal community aren't as essential and bright as any other 5 watt beacon of online truth. On the contrary... "I'm (an |
Thursday, 10th |
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Monkey and I approved this web message."
