>
>>For college kids of that era, plenty still used the traditional mail
>>to communicate with parents, old friends, lovers, etc since long
>>distance charges, while dropping, were still expensive. When Bell
>>came out with big discounts for direct dialed calls after 11 pm,
>>college kids used it since they were often up at odd hours (of course
>>some roommates were not and didn't appreciated a midnight phone call.) >
>I lived in the neighborhood next to West Harlem Community
>College (name changed to protect the innocent) in upper
>Manhattan in the 1970s.
>
>Pretty much anytime I tried making a long distance
>call from my home between 23:00 and midnight I'd
>get an "all circuits busy" intercept.
>
>Naturally every time the repair folk checked things
>out they were either doing it during the daytime
>or from another location.. so things were fine.
>
>I finally got ahold of someone who put two and two
>together and realized that the long distance trunks
>between the local central office (which served
>my exchange and the college's) and the Long Lines
>Center were getting maxed out when all the kids
>called out at 11 pm...
>
>
It looks like so CO engineers were not doing their work on busy time trucking. I remember have to do re-arrangement a couple of times a year. At least now with electronic offices and fiber it makes things a lot easier to do.