consider the following block:

------------------------------------------------------------------
if(new_rec_ptr != NULL) // If no error allocating memory, get data
{ // and insert node.
// Get name and phone number from the user.
cin.ignore(80,'\n');
cout << "\nEnter a new record.\n";
cout << "Last Name: ";
getline(cin,new_rec_ptr->last_name);
cout << "First Name: ";
getline(cin,new_rec_ptr->first_name);
cout << "Phone Number: ";
getline(cin,new_rec_ptr->phone_num);

insert_node(new_rec_ptr);
}
------------------------------------------------------------------

i have not seen the cin.ignore before... what does this line do?

The ignore member function skips over a designated number of characters (default is one character) or terminates upon encountering a designed delimiter (the default delimiter is EOF which causes ignore to skip to the end of file when reading from a file).