That’s a theme in Connie Willis’ novels about the Oxford time-travelling historians, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear. Time travel is strictly controlled by Oxford academics, but despite their good intentions, they never get it quite right. A young woman sent back to a 14th-century English village, for example, has the wrong dialect, too-fine clothes, and is too clean.
Connie Wills wrote Doomsday Book in 1992. There’s an important plot point regarding a character waiting for hours by a landline phone for another character to call. This scene is set in 2054.
