I remember reading once that those old-school telephone operators who used to manually patch calls through, if they had not been replaced by computer technology, that about 1/3 of the country would have to be employed patching calls through to handle current call volumes. clearly that would be inefficient. but with so many people patching calls through there would probably be fewer callers. The fear is always that there is nothing on the other side –nowhere productive for the unemployed call-patchers to go….and you know, maybe there actually is nothing on the other side…