Drawing on eighty years' worth of corporate films produced by the Bell Companies beginning in 1910, Caroline Martel's inspired The Phantom of the Operator traces a speculative and revisionist history of women telephone operators. In what was portrayed as a dream career in the telephone's early days, women with bobbed hair working at switchboards full of tangled cords give way to dial telephones and sincere, conservative young women redirecting calls. The “future” brings touchtone telephones, short skirts, and seductive voices; eventually, the women themselves disappear. Martel's ghostly, skeptical voice-over ponders the standardization of operators' voices, the scientific management of their gestures, and their eventual replacement by simulations.