I was born already wired to do my job at Creighton’s switchboard.

Before I began working there, my sister sat at that desk and my grandmother before her.

With the official closing of the switchboard last week, it reminds me of what a Creighton tradition that small office was, and what expereinces my family has had with that position.

Claire Harris was talking to some guy on the phone. Upstairs, the Rev. Joseph Zuercher, S.J., was waiting for an important call, seeing how he was the president of Creighton at the time. While she was chatting, she transferred all calls to his room, so he wouldn’t miss his important conversation.

When she was done with her call, and her shift at the switchboard, she left the tiny office and headed home, forgetting to transfer the calls back to the switchboard.

His phone rang all night.

When she got into work the next day, Zuercher walked into her office. “I hope that call of yours was important,” he said, and walked away.

That was 1944, and Claire Harris is my grandma.

“I was so embarrassed,” she said, recalling the story last week. “But it was OK. He liked me. The priests were always good to me when I was at the switchboard.”

I couldn’t agree more. Yes, my grandma and I share the same genetics, but we also have something else in common. We were both switchboard operators in the administration building. She was there back when she physically transferred calls wearing a headset and plugging one line into another. I just operated a fancy phone in the same little room since I was 14.

As of last week, the switchboard as we know it is gone. That tiny office in what freshmen know as Creighton Hall is vacant and I am out of a job. An answering service replaced my, “Creighton University, how may I help you?” The rest of the calls have moved down to the Harper Center, Creighton’s new “front door.”

Now, after seven years, it’s hard to think I’m the last student operator in that office. It’s the end of a family tradition. My grandmother, then my older sister, then me. And not just my family, but the Wilwerdings, the Fleckys and others.

It’s hard to explain the sentiment about a minimum wage job I had for seven years, in a room smaller than most coat closets. But the truth is, it’s the best job I ever had.

One Jesuit remarked before I left, “I’ll miss the people who worked the switchboard, watching some of the young people grow up and mature.”

Well, I’ll miss the people, too. The Jesuits are why I stuck around the switchboard for so long. The Rev. Ed Larkin, S.J., helped me decide where I would go to high school, then college. The Rev. Charles Kestermeier, S.J., always joked with me about what “good” literature really was. The Rev. Jack Zuercher always had something funny to say.

While it was partly my responsibility to take care of the Jesuits – take their mail, call them for dinner appointments, transfer their calls – they took care of me. And while I’ll see most of them around campus, the closing of the switchboard makes me wonder, is this growing campus losing some of its personability? Instead of a warm voice answering the phone to potential students, it’s a recording. Instead of a student taking in-house mail for the priests, it’s a drop box.

Some things have to go with a new age, but I really think the Creighton switchboard is part of the institution. I mean, no one would replace the “golden elevator” with a cheaper, more efficient model, would they?

So, as I’m getting ready to graduate (and looking for a new job), I hope Creighton remains what I’ve always seen it as: a warm community full of people who believe in it as an idea.

And to those freshmen who have made it to the end of this column – when you walk into Creighton Hall looking for the Registrar or business office, look around. Look at the portraits of the past presidents, the original donors to the institution, the biography of Mary Lucretia Creighton on the wall.

Or peer into that tiny office with the words “Information” written on the window, because these things are what make Creighton what it is.