The primary office for most of England's courts. *The Central Office was established in 1879 to consolidate the masters and associates of the common-law courts, and the clerical functions of the Crown Office of the Queen's Bench Division, the Report and Enrollment offices of the Chancery Division, and several other offices.


And yes, the CO is where all local loops in a given area connect, and where circuit switching occurs. Some are manned, some are unmanned. Occasionally, something fucks up and they have to fix it. There was one CO in the upper part of New Jersey that was flooded for a couple of days (months ago), but all of their equipment was wet for the following two weeks and it had to be replaced, piece by piece. It was heinous.

Most COs are digital now; they used to have some cool sounds that you can hear on the web: http://members.xoom.com/the_co/sound.html
Enigmatic location which is the storehouse of all corporate information. Many businesses rely on the central office. If you've lost your luggage, rest assured that the central office knows where it is. Best Buy out of SmartMedia cards, once again, the central office will know when the next shipment is coming in, how many will be in that shipment, and how much you can expect to pay for one when they do arrive. Indeed this ingenious building is possessed of a vast network of hyper-quantum mega-computers connected to some extradimentional space wherein all consumer or corporate knowledge is contained.

The central office is also the approving entity for all requests of any reasonable magnitude. Are you waiting for that Purchase Order to be approved? Likely it is sitting at the central office awaiting a signature. Your Offer Letter? also awaiting approval from the central office. Indeed, as authoritarian entities go, the central office dwarfs world leaders in it's power.

Despite it's importance to the continuation of commerce in this world economy the central office appears, from the outside observer, to be massively under-staffed. This condition causes phones to go unanswered, and on the off chance that your call is answered, expect to be put on hold for a length of time that will test your will and your bowel control. Of course the stresses of working in such an environment assure that the individual on the other end of the line will probably not be in the best of moods. Also, in organizations the mere size of the central office there is a significant change that your call has been routed to the wrong department, if this is the case, chances are that you will be transfered to another incorrect department where an inexperienced trainee will be unable to properly answer your inquiry, lacking even the knoweldge of how to tranfer a call. Large organizations often have a high rate of employee turnover, so this type of incident should come as no surprise.

The central office is often referred to as "the home office" or "headquarters", however it is obvious to the observer that all of these terms represent the same monolithic entity. When dealing with the central office it is important that you are patient, persistent and do not hesitate to verbally express how steamed the whole experience is making you. People working at the central office are so used to this sort of behavior to a point where they no longer know how to respond to anything else.


let it be known that a group of intrepid explorers and private invesitagtors have undertaken the hurculean task of actually locating the physical whereabouts of the central office. One would assume that the mere size of a structure whose purpose is so paramount would make it hard to miss, however, this has not been the case.


further investigation has uncovered that the central office is, in fact, a disused shanty inhabited by an elderly husband and wife with their pet monkey and a Mac Classic.

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