The console beeps again: a request for Michael Watson in Eliot House. "I have a Michael D. Watson in Eliot-K and a Michael K. Watson in Eliot-D," says Kathy. "It might be a typo but I'll give you both numbers."

She sighs. "Sometimes when it got slow," she says, "I would quiz myself on how many numbers I knew by heart. The last time I counted, it was 450." She gestures to the push-buttons on her console. "I know a lot of them just by the pattern of the numbers. Like I'll know a number is a box in the top corner--something like that." She stops and thinks for a moment, and then breaks out laughing. "I guess I'd be totally shot on a dial phone."

In the five years that Kathy has worked as a University operator, probably no one has spoken to more Harvard students (except her fellow operators), and yet probably no one knows less about them. "Some of them are rude, some of them are real nice, some of them are stuck up, some of them are real friendly," she says. "It's hard to form attitudes about them... I meet them as voices, and only for 20 seconds apiece."

From the desk next to Kathy's, Sara Chalfen breaks in. "You know, it's funny you would say that, because just the other day I met someone over the phones. I made a slip of the tongue--you know what 'talking backwards' is, like 'balking tackwards'--well, that's what happened. It wasn't deliberate, I just made a stupid mistake and it sounded really strange. We just started joking about it-me and the guy on the other end-and we started talking about what kind of night it was; the guy was telling me how busy he was, things like that. And this guy had a Texan accent, and I like Texan accents so I asked him where he was from, and he told me Houston. And you know, I just didn't feel like taking the bus home that night, and I didn't want to call my father to come pick me up. So I asked him if he wanted to walk me home. And he did."

Someone asks if she's seen him since that night. "Yeah, I've seen him since then. 'I've also gotten him on the phone since then, too. I got him on my line twice the other day."

She takes the earplug out of her ear to fix her hair. "You know, it'd be nice if people knew we weren't just cold-blooded. We do have feelings, we don't like it if people hang up on us, we don't like it if people are rude to us. And we do like it if people talk to us."