Alfdog

Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, August 31, 2007

Good morning. At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be ... something you're going to have to find on your own.

As of Sept. 19, dialing to get the correct time in California will no longer work, the service a victim of outdated modes, advancing technology and declining use.

California and Nevada are the last states where AT&T provides the free service, and by October, only Nevada will be left, said John Britton, a company spokesman.

No one could be sadder than the precisely toned Atlanta woman who's known to millions only by her voice.

"I'm sorry that it's fading away," said Joanne Daniels, who began intoning the time recordings 25 years ago. "It makes me feel old."

Time is no longer on her side.

Electronic telephone equipment that automatically conveys the time to callers is breaking down and can no longer be fixed or replaced, Britton said.

The proliferation of household sources for the correct time, such as computers, cell phones and televisions, has diminished the need for the time number, Britton said. Calls through the trunk lines for the time service take up as little as 8 percent of the capacity, he said.

"It's not like it was in 1929," Britton said.

That year, as a public service, the forerunner of AT&T initiated time service in California. An operator read the time off wall clocks to callers.

Soon after, equipment came along that automatically answered and dispensed the time and, in some locations, the temperature.

Basically, a light scanned film strips in revolving "drums" that read the correct synchronized segments of the recording.

An Atlanta company manufactured the equipment and as part of their service, they recorded all the numbers and introductions. Which is how Daniels -- the Atlanta woman -- got the job.

"I was known as the lady in the drum," she said.

Daniels was not the first woman to do the recording, but she is decidedly the last.

By word of mouth, the speech teacher and actress heard of the recording job and tried out for it in the 1970s, she said. A friend had encouraged her to audition her dulcet voice.

The ideal candidate would impart no hint of her homeland, such as the Deep-South lilt that honeys Daniels' natural patter.

"I turn it off," said Daniels.

When she landed the job, she worked in an Atlanta studio with earphones and a metronome measuring her speech.

"I had to get certain things done within one and a half seconds," she said.

When she did the recordings for California -- Pacific Standard Time -- she probably spent two days in the studio, she said.

"You're saying a lot of times, you know," she said.

Daniels laughs when she talks about how others think she made a mint off her work. She got a standard recording fee, rather than residuals -- payment for every use.

"I would be a very rich woman," she said.

Daniels, who dislikes measuring her own time, gives her age as solidly beyond senior citizen discount. She is hardly retired.

A stage actress who toured nationally, Daniels heads up a nonprofit corporation that stages a comedy revue for senior centers and retirement homes.

After the phone company work, she went on to supply the voice in local and national commercials during the 1980s and early 1990s for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, the Salvation Army and insurance companies.

Her voice seemed everywhere.

A man once came up to her on an airplane, peered at her face, determined to come up with a name.

" 'I know you,' he said to me," Daniels said. " 'Your voice, I know your voice. I know you. You're somebody, aren't you?' "

The man finally realized why he knew the voice.

By discontinuing the time calls in California, the phone company will gain 300,000 new telephone numbers previously reserved for the service. The 767 or POP in Northern California is generally followed by 2676 or CORN, but any four numbers dialed after the 767 will connect to the time service, Britton said.

After Sept. 19, a message saying the service is no longer available will play for one year on any number with the 767 prefix.

So, does anyone really know what time it is? If anyone in America does, it's Tom O'Brian, chief of the time and frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

He's the nation's timekeeper, ensconced in Boulder, Colo., home of the atomic clock, the country's official time source.

Our time needs have grown beyond the right time to meet for lunch, he said.

Cell phones, television broadcasts, GPS devices, all rely on atomic accurate time, he said. So does the nation's power grid: One split second off, and near disaster.

"The technology that permeates our lives requires extremely accurate synchronology," O'Brian said.

The atomic clock works by counting the known number of vibrations of certain atoms to measure a second. Since it was first developed in 1949, the accuracy has improved so that it will be off by no more than one second in 80 million years.

The institute offers its own time service -- call (303) 499-7111 -- where callers can get coordinated universal time or what is commonly called Greenwich Mean Time, O'Brian said. It's more of a novelty, but even those calls have dropped off, he said.

Even a science-minded guy like O'Brian laments the demise of Daniels' time voice.

"I called it just for fun," O'Brian said, "to see how accurate it was."


Cliffzors: Where's my money Vito?

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MWPC Presidente , MW80's #001 , MWJC #002 , MWAN #011

LiquidStang

That old school crap only worked in like CA and NV anyhow.......

Vince

Pity post for Fapdog.

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