not to knock my own institution

Today, three of us went on a short field trip to a nearby building, to have a pager replaced, which had taken an inadvertant bath in some toilet bowl water, and had consequently short-circuited. It seemed funny, upon entering the basement, that there was a display case containing an old nurses uniform and other such medical relics.

The next office door was labeled "telecommunications," and we all joked that is was a regular "NASA" at our institution. We mocked that the hospital pretended to make these major advancements in medical technology, and at the same time, were running their medical records like a library card catalogue. So it seemed even funnier when we walked in to the archaic office, and saw a line-up of about 8 ancient pagers on a small side table. Were those the pagers they offered, or were those like a timeline of the advancements in pager technology? For some reason I couldn't tell... I was looking for the cups on a string apparatus at the end of the row.

As the woman in the office licensed our new pager, my friend pointed out the telephone on the nearest end table. It's hard to describe, because it was a gigantic control panel of a phone and could only have been fully understood by an experienced operator from the 1940's or someone from the Starship Enterprise. I think I saw a crank on the side. I had to turn my body in the opposite direction, because I couldn't even look at the phone without laughing.