The Circa 1992 Phone Tree

by Walt Carvalho

Chris the local little league coach has just gotten a call from the league president. Apparently a tree had fallen because of high winds the night before. The sixty two foot sycamore was lying across Chris’s opponents baseball field. It is now 8:22am. Chris now has a problem. He is scheduled to meet his team for their playoff game fifty two miles from home at 10:00am to meet and warm-up. The first pitch is scheduled for 10:45am.

Now Chris is realizing that the clock is ticking. To make a growing problem even worse the president notifies him that due to schedule restraints the game time cannot change. The final piece to this puzzle is a new game location. It is a ballpark Chris has never been to before, twelve miles further than the original field and it’s in a different town.

Special problems require special solutions! He needed to notify his entire team quickly before they left home. Chris goes quickly to his handy notebook and retrieves the home phone number for his team mom Sarah. She is the leader of The Phone Tree! The phone tree system was used mainly to reduce the time of one person on the phone calling everyone. Instead, it was created like a chain. The first person (Sarah) would call two people and they would call their two people and so on, till everyone got the message. Good in theory, not always in practice.

You see, not everyone had cell phones in 1992. Phone calls were generally made on landlines. If someone on the chain was not home to answer the call they were generally left uninformed. It still created time-consuming work to confirm who got the message and who didn’t. Communication without a cell phone was then lost once they left home. Is there any doubt as to the problems that could come out of such an antiquated system? As the number of participants grew in this format the problems increased.

So the question today is; Why then is it that with all that is available to us in the form of communication, many of us still think of things with a phone tree mentality? Why don’t some of us begin taking advantage of all the possibilities to not only link better to each other, but to also share and grow? Today Coach Chris and Team Mom Sarah could have done a lot more in a lot less time.

Photo: Kren