36 Mr. John Lee on 



again and again and have found it hopelessly wrong. Certainly 

 I am not ready to condemn an operator merely on my own 

 conception of the passage of time ; nor am I prepared to pit my 

 conjecture of the passage of time against that of the various 

 appliances given to the operator for making the record, appliances 

 which both indicate the time and check the record. There are 

 circumstances in which three minutes seems to be a desperately 

 short period ; I expect the young man and maiden, to whose 

 conversation I have already alluded, would think it had only 

 lasted seconds when, in truth, it ran into tens of minutes. Other 

 types of conversation seem to be prolonged. But the telephone 

 machine is ruthless. Three minutes in its eyes are three single 

 minutes. The operator who asks you to have another call has 

 no interest whatever in cutting you short. She herself has her 

 observers. She is doing her duty under the eyes of strict 

 supervision. She is not knitting, even in days when all the rest 

 of the world is knitting. She is not reading novelettes. She is 

 not talking to her young man, that phantom young man of the 

 subscriber's fancy, for to her the telephone is a professional 

 thing, and even when all the rest of the world does its love- 

 making l)y telephone she will scorn to do so. For to her it is 

 unpoetic, her bread and butter, her craft. To the rest of the 

 world it is an embroidery on life ; to her it is life itself. It has 

 modified her conception of space and time in that it has made 

 them real and accurate, the things-in-themselves. The rest of 

 the world are only in process of having its conceptions modified. 

 Psychologically she is in advance of her time. 



There are other characteristics. It is strange how numbers 

 are affected by the telephone. New limitations of memory are 

 revealed. The transposition of digits follow broadly certain well- 

 known laws. A subscriber will look at the directory and pick 

 out a nmber, say 3547. This is a difficult number to remember 

 in the brief period which elapses from the printed page to the 

 telephone. Why 1 Because the human mind yearns to give the 

 figures in sequence, and it will give them in sequence unless it is 



