My sister in law worked for the phone company too, as an operator. My brother “met” her through her assisting him making calls, he had to do some detective work to find out who she was and get someone to actually introduce them so he could ask her out.
For a couple of years in college I ran the switchboard for the dorms with the trunk system- plugging cords in to manually place calls for people on campus. We had to dial long distance calls for the students too. Replaced it with a PBX board right after I left.
My dad did trunk stuff too!
I never understood it. He said it involved manually plugging big wires into stuff.