The voice with a smile: Joseph T. Massey Jr. celebrates 55 years at Emory

Long before Joseph T. Massey Jr. was implementing complex telecommunications systems across Emory hospitals, he was a boy sitting before a telephone switchboard, fascinated by its plugs, lights and keys - features he'd later come to know as circuit connections, signaling controls and the like.

He first operated a switchboard for his father's hotel in Macon, Georgia, at age 11. Back then, he didn't know it would set him on the path to a long and storied Emory career.

Massey, the voice-systems architect with the Office of Information Technology, has worked at Emory for 55 years, making him the longest-serving staff member across all university schools and units. He will join other Emory employees celebrating milestone service anniversaries of 25 years or more at the Staff Service Awards Luncheon on Tuesday, Nov. 19.

But in the 1960s, before he knew the science of his trade, there was something magical about the switchboard. Each connected call was a portal to another world.

"It was like the original video game," he says. "You're sitting there, and you have no control over how many calls you're going to get at one time. If you were really good you could overlap them, and you'd be connecting the first call's number while you're hearing the second number in your headset."

Massey began his career at Emory in 1969 while a student at Georgia Tech. He worked the switchboard for Emory University Hospital Midtown (then named Crawford Long Hospital), where he could process about 200 calls an hour. Any good operator, though, needed more than just board-related acumen, he says. The job also required charm. So, he developed his own catch phrases and changed the inflection of his voice.

"That was one thing everybody in America understood," he says. "When you called a telephone operator, you were expected to receive 'a voice with a smile.'"

For the last 55 years, Emory has received just that.

Connecting Emory

"Joe has been at Emory doing his job longer than I've been alive," says Wayne Ortman, chief network officer for Emory University and Emory Healthcare. "He's been around telephony for so long that he's gone through multiple generations of technologies, and he understands the lineage and how we got to these [current systems]."

By the 1980s, when Massey led Emory's effort to overhaul its telephone service from electromechanical to computerized systems, he had demonstrated excellence not only in technical knowledge, but also personal and managerial skills. In his early days at Emory, he uncovered a billing error with a phone provider that saved the university more than $10,000 per year.

One of the first major projects Massey led was creating a tie-line network that connected the phone services for Emory campus, Emory Clinic, Emory Hospital Midtown and Grady Memorial Hospital.

"In those days, if you were at Emory Hospital and wanted to call a doctor at the clinic you had to dial nine, dial the seven-digit number, wait for the operator to answer then ask for the extension," he says. "The tie-lines connected us all together where you could just dial a two-digit code and save a lot of work for the operators and time for the staff calling back and forth."

Years later, he led the way in adapting to a computerized system, which eventually became the university's current Enterprise Avaya IP telephone system that now serves seven hospitals and supports nearly 60,000 phones.

The switch brought with it the demise of an old technological friend.

"We went to electronic custom-sets that were digitally controlled by the central computer of the phone system and the cord switchboards went away," he says. "We went to what would be known as telephone consoles for the operators, so it was all push buttons, no cords."

Keeping with the times

Ortman joined Emory's Network Services team in 2016 after nearly 15 years at AT&T.

He has spent more than 20 years in the business and has always been fascinated by the history of its technology. He sees Massey as not only a great colleague, but also a living library of telephony.

"I was a child of the 80s, and we were past [switchboards] at the time," Ortman says. "However, I've been around telephone companies long enough to know: That's our history. Joe got to touch those things."

"A lot of the technologies today are really built upon some of those telephony technologies from 50, 60, 70 years ago," he adds.

A requirement of thriving in one field for 55 years, Massey says, is "staying constantly abreast of the changes."

"That's the hardest part of the job," he adds. "When you retire from this particular field, you're not coming back because it changes so fast. You'll be obsolete in just a few short months."

To keep pace, Massey constantly reads, attends vendor presentations and writes specification manuals - or specs - for telephone systems. A typical spec is around 700 pages, he says.

"There are new systems constantly going in and constantly being modified [at Emory]," he says. "Right now, we're in the middle of moving patient access from the Verizon system to a system called Genesis Cloud."

'Story time with Joe'

Manuals, binders and specs that contain nearly a century of telephony knowledge, not to mention antiques from the industry, line the walls of Massey's home office. He can pull stories from these artifacts, as well as his own experiences, at any time.

"I love the fact that I'm the expert, and I can draw on this body of knowledge and use it effectively," he says. "That's very rewarding."

But beyond his expertise - and reputation as the office sage - he's known for his easygoing nature and wit.

"I enjoy working with Joe because he always brings a fantastic attitude," Ortman says. "The other part that makes Joe is his sense of humor. Story time with Joe is one of my favorite pastimes."

Those stories could involve any number of things: his experiences playing the pipe organ, his interactions with "people whose names are on the buildings at Emory," and yes, of course, the history of telephony.

"I enjoy the people here," Massey says of these everyday interactions. "Everybody's very conscientious. Most of the people we deal with at Emory are wanting to do a good job and looking for a way to do it."

And for 55 years he's helped make that happen, a voice with a smile.

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