One of our readers recently forwarded me this announcement from AT&T – apparently Operator Services and Directory Assistance will no longer be available on their U-verse voice lines – starting January 1, 2023.
Instead, they advice that “Addresses and numbers can still be located using online services, such as internet search engines, including Google®, Bing®, and Yahoo!®”.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever called either operator services or 411 for personal reasons – but I’ve made plenty of test calls to these services; and I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my life troubleshooting problems with operator services on MF trunks.
So I’m not sure how I feel about the death of these services. On the one hand, in today’s world, I can’t imagine many people require operator assistance to place a phone call. On the other hand, being able to dial a human operator harkened back to the early days of telecoms, when every call was operator assisted. It feels like we’ve lost something historic and special.
What about you?
- Do you still offer operator services or a 411 directory assistance?
- How do you feel about the demise of these services?
