It is the nightmare of a telephone receptionist: lots of phones ringing all at once, and it is difficult to tell which is the right one. This often leads to a moment of somebody trying each phone one after another, picking them up in turn, until the ringing stops. This can be used to illustrate a chaotic office or business, with an overworked receptionist, or it can show that somebody is running a very Busy and Important operation; or that a barrage of complaints are arriving at once. If the phones have cords, the user might get tangled up in all the different cords for an additional gag.
Can be Truth in Television in a busy office, especially if all the telephones are of the same design, and sound exactly the same. In some offices, if nobody answers the telephone at the reception desk within a few rings, many other telephones in the office will start ringing automatically. This trope was more prominent with old-fashioned telephones with loud bells, rather than the more modern electronic sound. Also, in a modern real-life office, the mundane reality will not be a person with multiple telephones, but an operator juggling several calls at once, using only one or two phones. With a modern system, it is also usually possible to answer a ringing phone from another desk.
A more modern equivalent is several mobile phones ringing at once, with everybody reaching down to see if theirs is ringing, often parodied in messages reminding people to turn phones off in a theatre or cinema.
Some PBS pledge drives used to be like this. There would be a wide table with multiple phones and operators (possibly 2 tiers worth) with frequent ringing sounds, while an announcer in the foreground would explain how you can become a member of said station.
This can be exaggerated if somebody is using two or more telephones at once, with one in each hand, another held between their ear and shoulder, and a headset, and maybe others.
May overlap with Split-Screen Phone Call. See "Hands Full" Gag when dealing with holding many objects.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Pokémon the Series: In "Deceiving Appearances!", Lusamine receives a phone call on two different phones when she's about to give the students of the Pokémon School a tour of Aether Paradise. This leaves her too busy with work that her daughter Lillie ends up giving the tour instead.
- At the end of Tamagotchi! episode 34a, there is a scene where TamaPtchi and ADtchi are inundated with and stressfully answer calls from a lot of viewers complaining about TAMAX-TV's recent programming, all on a bunch of black-colored, old-fashioned telephones.
Comic Strips
- Garfield: In a October 16, 1978 comic
◊ made specifically for the Chicaco Sun Times (and thus out of the regular series), Garfield is send away from the Sun Times office, after which the editor receives multiple phone calls at once from readers asking about Garfield or demanding his return. It works as the final panel shows Garfield returning.
Films — Animated
- Chicken Little (2005): Chicken Little rings the bell for the second time to tell the town about the aliens, throws everyone into a panic again, isn't believed again, and everyone is mad at him. The next day, his father Buck is answering numerous calls from several phones, all from angry townsfolk who were caught up or got hurt in the chaos, while his laptop alerts him with "You have hate mail. ...You have more hate mail. ...Your hate mail box is full."
Buck: Hello, I'm sorry. Hello, I apologize. Hello, give me a break! Hello—what? You were trampled? That's terrible. I, uh, I thought rabbits' feet were supposed to be lucky. (mirthless chuckle)
- The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: After the titular rabbit's rampage of eating all the vegetables in the village, Wallace is bombarded with calls from angry customers who had bought his "anti-Pesto" protection from rabbits. He is seen answering several telephones at once, alternating between the calls, while other telephones are ringing. When Gromit appears, Wallace disconnects all the phones from the wall in one movement.
- In the "Our War Game" part of Digimon: The Movie, one of the incidents caused by Infermon's rampage throughout the Internet are multiple mobile phones ringing all at the same time, leading to crowds of people trying to answer their devices simultaneously.
- Freddie as F.R.O.7: A Running Gag is the Brigadier answering multiple phones as his superiors try to demand answers from him about recent events, usually resulting in the Brigadier getting physically tangled up by the phone cords. This is subverted at the end of the movie, where it seems like the Brigadier might tie himself up again, only to smoothly navigate himself out by the time the last call ends.
- The Nightmare Before Christmas: When Jack Skellington starts delivering Halloween Town’s scary presents, the local police station only has one phone. As more and more people start calling in to report the Santa Claus impostor, all of a sudden the policeman has three phones on his desk.
Films — Live-Action
- Bend It Like Beckham: A brief sight gag during Pinky and Teetu's engagement party has somebody's cell phone go off, causing everyone present to start pulling theirs out and start fiddling with them. It turns out it's Teetu's work calling him; once he gets off the phone after telling the guy off for bothering him when he's off work, Mr. Bhamra tells him to turn it off.
- Police Story: After getting demoted to a boonie precinct, Jackie Chan finds himself having to balance four or five different calls while he's trying to cook lunch. Eventually he just gives up and leaves them all off the hook so he can eat in peace.
Literature
- The Corps: In the novel Retreat, Hell!, set during the Korean War, an Army Sergeant is manning the communications room for a headquarters building. A phone rings, but since there's five different phones on the desk in front of him he has no way of knowing which one it is. He answers each, one at a time, and swears loudly when he gets a dial tone. It's only when he picks up the fifth phone that he gets the correct one, and an upset officer who wants to know why it took him so long to answer.
- A book How Your Body Works illustrates the control centre of the brain as being a little man with telephones all over his desk, and he uses two at once to communicate with the various parts of the body.
Live-Action TV
- Emergency!: In one episode, a bookie has a heart attack and the cluster of phones on his desk keep ringing while Gage and Desoto are trying to treat him. Gage even tries to answer them briefly. The guy then tries to get phones hooked up in his hospital room despite Brackett forbidding it and saying he’s going to die from stress if he doesn’t stop.
- Fawlty Towers: Downplayed in that only two phones are involved. In "A Touch of Class", the phone rings while Basil is trying to hang a picture. After trying to get somebody else to answer it, he puts the picture down and picks up the phone: but he picks up the wrong one, and then Sybil enters and answers the other phone. This follows a Bait-and-Switch moment as the camera rests on the wrong phone.
- Frasier: The episode "Freudian Sleep" involves Frasier coming into his cobweb-infested booth only to be met by Roz informing him that if someone doesn't call into the show after six months of not receiving any, he will be fired by Kenny. He starts the show without a call initially, but then the phone begins to ring. As he rushes to the other side of the booth, where a bunch of phones are sitting, he begins attempting to answer them all to find whoever's calling before they hang up while Roz dresses up as a character from Thelma & Louise and threatens to drive the booth off a cliff. It's revealed to be All Just a Dream when Frasier suddenly wakes up and bolts upright in bed.
- Get Smart: A variation in which Max gets a call at his flat and has to check through all the various household items lying around that are secretly a Shoe Phone (including the Trope Namer) before eventually realizing that the call is coming in on his actual, non-disguised, civilian telephone.
- A Hannah Montana episode featured Jackson and Thor using multiple cell phones to call a local radio station to try and win courtside seats to a Los Angeles Lakers game. When one of them successfully connects to the station, the two try looking for the phone that made the call. Thor ends up finding it, but inadvertently tosses it away. Luckily, Jackson manages to get the phone and win the tickets.
- Odd Squad: In "High Maintenance", Olympia and Otis retreat to O'Mary's office to relax, only for Owen to ask why they aren't answering the phone and informing them that the phones are ringing off the hook in Obby's office. When they get there, they begin answering every phone they can, to little avail. Olympia thinks that she fell asleep at her desk and that what she's experiencing is a nightmare, only for Oprah to arrive and tell her that it's no dream at all, and that there's a bigger threat to be dealt with in the form of a flood of popcorn in the bullpen, which they rush to deal with.
- In an episode of the 2005 TV series Train Man (2004), Tsuyoshi needs to get a charger for his cell phone; when he goes to one store, someone else takes every charger off the shelf, and when Tsuyoshi questions him he shows that he has a dozen cell phones hanging off his belt.
Theatre
- Angels in America: Roy Cohn is introduced sitting at a desk with a complicated phone system with flashing lights and a variety of beeps and chimes. Throughout his conversation with Joe, Roy is toggling between multiple phone lines, simultaneously placating clients, berating subordinates, and getting a judge's family tickets to the Broadway production of Cats.
- Newsies: After the number "Once And For All", where the Newsies organize a citywide strike to completely shut down New York City, the next scene depicts Pulitzer's secretaries having to deal with a bombardment of angry calls, with Pulitzer himself getting increasingly annoyed at how loud they’re getting.
Video Games
- PHN-HOME has the player hunt around a dark house for the ringing phone, which appear at various placed within the house. Part way through the game, there are multiple phones ringing at once and the player needs to find the correct ones to answer. These are seen in From https://devin-raposo.itch.io/phn-home and https://youtu.be/msaGNoZnILQ?si=xItjmh78TMfMyWSx&t=1080
- WarioWare Gold: The microgame Answering Machine has the player tap on a phone that must be answered. On levels 2 and 3, there is more than one phone, though only one is ringing. Tapping on an incorrect phone will trigger a loss.
Web Animation
- My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale: In "Foal Me Once", Hitch Trailblazer gets calls from all of Maretime Bay reporting stolen items, which quickly escalates to him having to juggle several phones at once and getting tangled in the cords.
Webcomics
- Hark! A Vagrant: The high-powered '80s businesswoman is depicted talking into multiple boxy old-school cell phones at once, into which she is decisively barking commands to "Buy!" "Sell!" "Merge!" (One of the phones is sitting on top of her head, while a corded phone receiver is draped over her neck.)
Web Original
- The Jolly Roger Telephone Company is a company that provides bots designed to waste the time of telemarketers and other unwanted callers. One of these, the biz-bots, is actually a pair of two - a male receptionist, who then transfers the caller to an incompetent female receptionist, or vice-versa, then back-and-forth if the call continues long enough. The female biz-bot, Polly Crackers, will claim at one point that all of her lines are ringing and she doesn't know what's going on or whom she's even talking to.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Butterfly", Karen has a musical number showing her manning the Elmore Help Desk. As she deals with a flood of callers, she's stuck holding half a dozen receivers at once, gets flustered, starts mixing up who she's talking to, and the callers start getting mad at her. Karen eventually snaps from the pressure, yells at everyone, hangs up on them all, and throws her desk out the window.
- Cool McCool comes equipped with a goodly number of hidden telephones on his person, presumably to call for back-up or to update his boss, Number One. During one mission, McCool receives an incoming call, but has no idea which phone is ringing. Collar phone? No. Wristwatch phone? No. Shoe phone? No. Mustache phone? No. Of course, the villain of the episode is able to escape capture while McCool is busy with this nonsense.
- Cyberchase: "Fortress of Attitude" has Buzz and Delete running a phone bank for cybersites surrendering to Hacker's latest (surprisingly successful) conquest scheme. Since there's only two of them and hundreds (possibly thousands) of potential surrenderers, they're quickly overwhelmed, and at one point Delete has two phones crossed into opposite ears with a third one balanced on his snout.
- The Flintstones:
- In "The Swimming Pool", a wild birthday party is thrown in the Flintstones' backyard, and the noise gets so loud that the police chief is stampeded with calls from angry neighbors, prompting him to dispatch one of his men to quiet things down.
- In the episode "The Tycoon", business mogul and Fred's doppelganger JL Gotrocks is at his desk with multiple phones ringing. After summarily answering some of the calls, he shoves all the phones off of his desk in frustration.
- Futurama: In "The Route of All Evil", Cubert and Dwight come back from delivering one million newspapers suspiciously quickly, so much so that even Fry notices something's up. The phone then rings, and when Leela answers, it turns out to be a disgruntled customer complaining that they haven't been receiving their papers. Then half-a-dozen other phones on the desk start ringing in unison, and Cubert and Dwight (who've secretly been dumping them on the Moon) realise the jig's up and go running to their fathers for help.
- Looney Tunes:
- In "Baby Bottleneck", Daffy is in charge of taking orders for new babies. Eventually, he's overwhelmed and yells "QUIET!" to stop the phones from ringing.
Daffy: Good morning! I'm sorry, Bing, you've used up your quota! Hello? Yes, Mr. Cantor, you say you haven't got your boy yet? Well, if at first you don't succeed... Hello? Who? Mr. Dionne? Mr. Dionne, please!
- In "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", Daffy, as detective Duck Twacy, gets a lot of calls about missing piggy banks from multiple candlestick phones, including an extra-tall one labeled for long distance calls. When his own piggy bank is stolen, he decides to call... Duck Twacy. He calls on one phone, then answers another, and is in the middle of holding a conversation with himself when he realizes that he's Duck Twacy.
- In "Baby Bottleneck", Daffy is in charge of taking orders for new babies. Eventually, he's overwhelmed and yells "QUIET!" to stop the phones from ringing.
- The PJs: Exploited. Young thugs have seized control of Thurgood's building, and have the Stubbs cooped up. Thurgood tries to sneak past them, but one thug demands to know where he's going. This challenge is accompanied by a red aiming laser dot on Thurgood's forehead, plus five or six red dots on Thurgood's rotund belly. Fortunately, Muriel knows to call one thug's cell phone, which causes all the thugs to pause while they figure out whose phone is ringing. By the time they answer the correct cell phone, Thurgood has slipped past them.
- In the Rocko's Modern Life episode With Friends Like These, Filburt and Heffer try to win a radio contest's tickets to a wrestling match by stockpiling hundreds of phones and all dialing the number. The plan gets derailed when they get tangled in the phones and only one appears to have gotten through, causing a frantic search to find the correct, ringing phone.
- The Simpsons: In "Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore", Homer runs into Apu's cousin Kavi while working in India. Kavi works for several different call centers, and is shown switching between three different phone calls, on three different phones, and affecting a different accent for each.
Kavi: [in neutral American accent] IBM helpline, this is Brian. Have you tried disabling your firewall? [in Texan accent] Dallas-Fort Worth Marriott. How can I help y'all? [Beat] Well, we have a Cotton Bowl special. Go Aggies! [in Jamaican accent] This is Queen Mama Jumbo. The stars tell me you have a question. [Beat] No, Jenny, don't be dating that boy. The bones don't lie. He's bad mojo, girl.
- In the Total Drama World Tour episode, "Aftermath: Revenge of the Telethon", when Geoff takes away the Peanut Gallery to use in Brain Blast, Blaineley is left to answer all their phones by herself. Each time it cuts back to her, she is more and more Tied Up on the Phone.
- Totally Spies!:
- Early on in "Starstruck", when the girls hear a phone ring while out on the street, all three of them pull out their phones and put them up to their ears—only for it to be revealed that only Clover's phone is ringing.
- In "Trent Goes Wild", Mandy ends up getting knocked over at one point, resulting in all of her many cellphones ending up on the ground right in front of her. And they're all ringing at once.
- Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color: In "An Adventure in Color", Ludwig Von Drake introduces the "question-and-answer" portion of the show from a desk lined with a dozen phones. A flood of calls, mostly wrong numbers, ensue.
- Yogi Bear: It's not uncommon for Ranger Smith to get bombarded with calls from Jellystone visitors thanks to Yogi's shenanigans.