Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter... I can't help but feel this is how the 1970's would have seen him.

Video is of Lily Tomlin, in her persona of Ernestine the Phone Operator, from September 1976. (https://vimeo.com/355556831)

For those of you whose parents were not even thought of in 1976, the phones in question here used to hang on walls, in your house. You could not take them to the other room (or out of the house even) unless you had a very long cord. If your friends called you, they'd not only need your phone number written down or memorized, they might have to talk to your mother before they got to you. The only information you could get from these without an operator intervention was the time (and sometimes weather). You used to have to pay more in addition to your regular service to make a phone call from say, California to New York (or often the next town over), and it was very expensive.

Just think of the phone switching center seen in the video as a modern day server room at Twitter, and Twitter as the Phone company, and it will all be amusing and make sense.

Elon Musk doesn't care... He doesn't have to...

PS - When in the f*c* did I get this old?

That is incredibly modern - by that time we had machines that could electronically pick up the phone and take a message... (my parent's first answering machine was a mechanical box that physically picked up the handset (which sat on the box) so it could play a tape recording into the handset mike - this got around AT&T's rule prohibiting attaching non-telco equipment to their lines)

Try Ms. Tomlin's earlier appearances the "One Ringy-Dingy" operator on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In... Here's just one sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFRc6nt4hbQ

Also seems relevant given all the tracking done by the big outfits, probably even more true today...

WheelyCurious