The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 2/5/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Katie Stevens Jim Hebbeln of CSU Telecommunications shows the line cards that are responsible for connecting all the telephone lines on campus. In total, there are 11,000 line cars for 11,000 phone lines.

If CSU were a living organism, the archaic telecommunications system that links together the more than 25,000 people on campus would be the brain.

Jim Hebbeln would be the neurosurgeon.

Like the Wizard of Oz, Hebbeln is the man behind the curtain -- the eyes and ears at the university's communication epicenter. He's the man in the receiver who bellows, "I'm sorry. The number you are trying to reach …"

A dying breed maybe, but in the age of iPhones, BlackBerries and Twitter, Hebbeln is the fleshy heart of the system, listening to the pulse of the campus and keeping a human touch to a digitizing world.

His office, cluttered with charts, old cables and phones, serves as the windowless command center from which he oversees CSU's 12,050 phone lines -- maintaining, updating and repairing the mechanics and software.

"I get this thing to work so someone can pick up a phone, punch a few buttons and they're connected to Europe or wherever," the old-school technician says, his mustache bristling over a smile as he motions to the rows of purring processors and vine-like cables in the adjacent switching room.

Hebbeln, who wired Durward and Westfall halls for a summer job 40 years ago, has been working with CSU's switching system since 1993 and says his 24 years of database work at Quest make him one of the best in the business. Even Princeton calls Hebbeln when they need telecom help.

It's this experience and multi-faceted expertise that make Hebbeln ideal for monitoring the thousands of signals that are transmitted to and from the campus phone lines, all of which run through the twisting wires and thousands of blinking computer chips.

Hebbeln knows what each one of them does and where each one goes.

"He's very, very into his telephony," his wife Debbie Hebbeln said.

Into telephony may be an understatement, but according to CSU's Vice President of Information, Patrick Burns, Hebbeln is just the man CSU needs to make sure its phone system works under any circumstance.

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