 employees viewed the people installing the new telephones as having taken away part of the Bell job, which they had, SO Bell was not too anxious to make cutovers a big success. Sometimes the interconnect sys- tem installers had just quit their jobs at the telephone company and were now on the other side from their former co-workers. You still needed the local telephone company to install new out- side lines or to make adjustments to the lines already in place to accommodate the new system. At that time, organizations were also required to install inter- face devices. These were circuit boards of questionable usefulness connected to the end of each Bell System outside telephone line to protect it from the foreign equipment that was being installed. These interfaces were rented to the customer by the Bell System company. This was a consolation prize awarded to Bell by the courts in exchange for having given up the lucrative system rental revenue. Actually, the interfaces just provided another point at which something could go wrong, which it often did. The early systems did not always work as promised, SO there were surprises. On several occasions, the installation company was unable to obtain the system that had been purchased SO they put in a substitute system from another manufacturer, hoping that no one would notice. I worked at a cutover where the customer had decided to purchase a used system. The installation company had not even bothered to remove the old coffee stains from the switchboard console! At this same cutover, it took a whole day before the installers could get the telephones to ring. When a call came into the switchboard, I would find out who it was for and run back to tell that person to pick up his telephone handset as a caller was there waiting! At another cutover, the customer had been told that the new telephones would be black, but the manufacturer only made white ones. That evening, the housings were removed from all the tele- The Telecom Handbook 38 309 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE phones and 