Telephone company funny

[jimlongley]

The mention of the terrorism bombing and arsons in another thread reminded me of this, and I thought y'all might be interested in some of the inner workings of the old Ma Bell.

In 1973 an arson fire caused a great deal of damage to a NY Telephone central office at 13th St. in NY City. I was working as a phone man upstate, way upstate, and was selected based, I found out later, on my work history, to be dispatched to NY City to help with the fire restoration.

I packed up my tools and clothes and took the train to NY, not quite knowing what a boonies Station Installer/Repairman would be assigned to do in such a situation. I got myself, as instructed, settled into a hotel room and then proceeded to the site. When I arrived there was a massive, well organized, state of confusion in progress and it took me a while to find the person I was supposed to report to. While I was searching for him, I was issued my hat and t-shirt declaring that I was part of the team.

When I reported I was told, after a consultation with a clipboard, that I would have a rotation in "the hole" from midnight to seven am, so I should go back to my room and get some rest and report back, sober, at about eleven thirty to be issued any tools I would need. I questioned what I would be doing in "the hole" and was told that I would be "spinning splices." When I pointed out that I had no real experience as a splicer, Mr. Clipboard threw a fit, much of which is not repeatable here, but the gist of it was that he was only supposed to have gotten qualified splicers, he didn't need installers and linemen, just qualified splicers, and that I should "wait over there" until he had time to straighten this one out.

Several hours later I was told that I had been traded to the Queens I/R garage for a qualified person and that I was to report there the next morning, and I should worry about transportation there on my own. I didn't even know where the place was.

The next morning, as instructed, I reported to the Queens garage and located the foreman I would be reporting to, who hadn't been made aware that I would be reporting to him and sat me aside while he dispatched his crew. This worthy then assessed my qualifications and assigned me a couple of troubles, issued me maps and keys to a vehicle and sent me off into the wilds of Queens to fend for myself.

I arrived at my first trouble, figured out what was wrong, and had it fixed in minutes, and went on to my next trouble. There I discovered that the problem was in the cable facilities back toward the central office, so I called in to the test board and after a long hold was told that there was an intermediate cross connnection point that I would have to check. I went there and proved the problem back toward the central office once again. When I called in to the test board then I was given a number and told to call back after lunch. I did as instructed, and it being only a little after ten am, I called in to dispatch and picked up another trouble, which I cleared on my own by about twelve fifteen.

After my lunch I called in with my number in line and only had to hold for about fifteen minutes before talking to a tester, who determined that the problem was in the cable (duh!) and that it had to be turned over to the splicers to fix.

I then called in and picked up another trouble, and after that another, and then yet another, which I finished in time to get back to the garage at about six.

When I arrived I found two people waiting for me, the foreman, who was concerned about my well being and why I was late, and the union business agent, who was there to give me heck for: a, working overtime when local union members didn't; b, working more than my assigned workload (two troubles handed to me in the morning) and; c, going into "two man" by myself.

The foreman just stood by while I was being read the riot act and when the union guy was done, he just kind of shrugged and took my time sheet and went onto his office.

At that point in time I decided that they didn't need me down there, and took it on myself to go back to my room, pack up my stuff, including my hat and t-shirt, and go back up to Albany.

The next morning I reported to my garage and when my boss asked me what I was doing there, I just told him that they didn't need me in NY City, and I went back to working the way I always did, with diligence and honesty.

I found out later that the original reason I was sent was that while I was in the Navy for four years I had been promoted, on paper, to Splicer, and that was the basis for my selection to be sent to NY City originally.

I also found out what "two man" was, a red lined area that had been declared, by the union, to be too dangerous for a person to work in alone, and not knowing, I had gone there alone.

And that the union contract, statewide, specified that before anyone on an out of town tour could be assigned to work overtime, ALL the persons in that job category in the garage had to be given an opportunity to work overtime, and assigned overtime was defined as anything more than "casual" and casual was thirty minutes or less.

It took the Queens garage almost a week to call my garage to check to see why I hadn't showed up the rest of the week. My boss, supportive as usual, told them that I had been reassigned and ordered back upstate.

[seamusTX]

The unions in New York were and probably still are a phenomenon.

I recall a story from a friend whose mother passed away in New York City. (IIRC, she had moved there with her second husband or something like that.) They had a pallbearers union. At the funeral, the coffin had to be carried by six bums (as he described them) in dickies and tattered suit jackets.

For the youngsters, a dickie was a dress shirt collar with a tie, minus the rest of the shirt. They were worn in hot weather before air conditioning was common, and by lazy people who had to dress for work. I don't think they're made any longer.

- Jim

[DoubleJ]

For the youngsters, a dickie was a dress shirt collar with a tie, minus the rest of the shirt. They were worn in hot weather before air conditioning was common, and by lazy people who had to dress for work. I don't think they're made any longer.

- Jim

We wore those as part of our Band uniforms, when I was in school. Even through college, as I recall.
and yes, we giggled nearly everytime the Band Director told to put it on

[BigBlueDodge]

Don't get me started on unions. The stories I hear from my brother in law from what goes on in Lockheed is disgusting. Unions do nothing more than promote underachieving, overpaid workers.

[jimlongley]

Don't get me started on unions. The stories I hear from my brother in law from what goes on in Lockheed is disgusting. Unions do nothing more than promote underachieving, overpaid workers.

While I agree with you to an extent, unions, after all, are generally for profit organizations and will generate profit any way they can by the easiest means possible, I have known several instances where they did save careers that would have been irretrievably lost under Texas' work at will laws.

In one instance a repairman was dispatched to a trouble on a coin phone. Security had disabled the phone and "salted" it with marked coins and called in the trouble as a customer. Security used to go on these fishing expeditions regularly, sometimes in response to revenue losses at particular phones and sometimes because they were suspicious of a particular repairman.

Mr. Hat (not his real name, he just always wore a dapper fedora) arrived at the phone, found a penny jammed in the return chute, cleared it, tested it, and deposited all other money that was loose inside in the box. Then he stepped inside the little grocery that it was outside of and bought a pack of cigarettes with change from his pocket. Security came swooping in with a local LEO and fired Mr. Hat on the spot as well as filing theft charges against him.

Mr. Hat had better then 30 years of service and would have been out the door without a pension if the union had not backed him up. They were able to show that Security did not follow the proper procedures in firing Mr. Hat and that there was less than proper cause for firing, as well as a laundry list of lesser items. They saved Mr. Hat's career and pension.

The whole thing centered on Mr. Hat testing the phone after he finished repairing it. Mr. Hat used some of the loose change in the phone to do the testing, some of which was the marked money, and in the process he took a coin out of his pocket, a dime, and mixed it with the other coins, and inadvertantly replaced his pocket money with one of the marked coins. It was one of those coins that he used to pay for the cigarettes.

The union established that there was the correct amount of money in the phone, that all that had happened was an innocent mixing of the coin phone's change with Mr. Hat's change and that there was no intentional misuse of company funds, even if Mr. Hat did not follow the correct procedure.

[dukesean]

Personally, I think unions still have their place in some industries. Airlines come to mind, when the executives ask the unions for concessions, only to give themselves ridiculous bonuses while the company loses money. Unions need to fight for the worker in these cases.

But NYC unions are definitely a different matter. I remember going to a trade show to help out my dad, and we were setting up our booth and adjusting the direction of the rented lighting fixtures. Some guy yelled at us and said that any adjustments to the position of the lighting needed to be done by a union worker, which of course would be performed at an inflated fee.

We just ended up doing it ourselves later at night when all the union folks went home at 5.

[WarHawk-AVG]

OP I am living the phone company massive, well organized, state of confusion right now

Guys don't knock unions..you will see within the next few years just how much we are going to need them!

[jimlongley]

I should make it clear that my union experience was, except for a couple of individual incidents, all in upstate NY, where the union that I belonged to was very different from the one in NY City, even if they bore the same name.

I got a kick, one time, out of showing up at a NY City site to run a special test with a special piece of test equipment, and the steward shut the site down in protest because I was management using craft tools. We sat around for hours while union and management consulted on the equipment I was using, and they finally came to the conclusion that I could use the equipment, because most of them didn't even know what it was and there were no craft people in the state, much less the city, who were qualified to use it, but any hand tools used to hook it up and such would have to be wielded by craft, not me. Talk about hampering operations.

Using the same equipment upstate, a union person questioned whether I was depriving craft of work, called the local, was informed that it was not a piece of equipment that craft used, and then I went ahead and used tools to hook it up and such, while he sat and watched and asked pertinent questions. When I left that job for a promotion later, he was one of the people I recommended to be promoted to replace me.

[BigBlueDodge]

and we wonder why companies are so quick to ship jobs out of the country! Jim, your stories echo stores I've heard from my brother in law working at Lockheed in Ft. Worth. When I hear those stories I just have to shake my head. Unions are nothing but a cancer.

[KBCraig]

and we wonder why companies are so quick to ship jobs out of the country!

This is a common perception, but the reality is that almost no jobs have been "shipped out of the country". Most have simply been eliminated here through increased efficiency (improved processes, technology, robotics, etc.), but they haven't been recreated elsewhere. Those jobs weren't "shipped", they just ceased to exist.

Unions are nothing but a cancer.

I've never been a fan of unions, even though I'm a union official. And in the public sector, of all places!

In the private sector, unions are often the worst enemy of their own constituents. They will strike for increased wages, and ultimately win the increase, but their members wind up making less money because strike pay is a pittance. Not to mention those who are laid off because of increased costs (reduced profits) to the company. Fat lot of good a raise does, if you're collecting unemployment.

Private sector unions that understand the profit motive can do good things for both employees and the employer. Without profit for the employer, there will be no employees -- and coincidentally, employees motivated by personal profit can do great things for the employer.

In the government sector, where there is no profit motive for the employer, it's entirely different. Agencies don't care how wrong they are, and they don't really care how much they wind up costing the taxpayers, because it doesn't affect their personal bottom line. The only way to make government agencies follow the law is to beat them over the head with arbitrator rulings and congressional inquiries.

That said, I know that public sector unions are some of the most despised --and despicable-- unions out there. All I can say is, mine isn't like that.

[MAFWG]

KBCraig wrote:
This is a common perception, but the reality is that almost no jobs have been "shipped out of the country". Most have simply been eliminated here through increased efficiency (improved processes, technology, robotics, etc.), but they haven't been recreated elsewhere. Those jobs weren't "shipped", they just ceased to exist.

[/bitter rant ON] Your statement may be true in general. However, I am aware of at least one Multinational Corporation with offices in Texas (whose name shall remain unspoken) that was transferring engineering jobs from the US to India (using Indian firms like WIPRO and Tata) specifically because they could hire 3 Indian Engineers for the cost of one US engineer. This seemed like a wonderful idea to upper management who thought that engineers were a commodity. However, as one of the people assigned make this program work, it was VERY clear that projects done this way took longer and had significantly more issues (some serious), to the point where any perceived cost savings were completely overshadowed by the effort required (usually by members of the same US engineering group the company was eliminating) to fix the issues. [/bitter rant OFF]

I had been with the company for seven years. We parted ways on less than happy terms.

MAFWG

[seamusTX]

At the risk of contributing to off-topic thread drift, exactly the same thing happened at the company that I work for. Jobs were eliminated in the U.S. and workers were hired in India almost on a one-to-one basis.

Granted, there was some featherbedding in the 1990s and some of the jobs that were eliminated in the U.S. were redundant. I have a lot more work to do now than I did eight years ago.

- Jim

[NcongruNt]

At the risk of contributing to off-topic thread drift, exactly the same thing happened at the company that I work for. Jobs were eliminated in the U.S. and workers were hired in India almost on a one-to-one basis.

Granted, there was some featherbedding in the 1990s and some of the jobs that were eliminated in the U.S. were redundant. I have a lot more work to do now than I did eight years ago.

- Jim

This also happened with a company I did tech support work for here. They laid off a bunch of folks and shipped all the jobs over to India. These kind of jobs are also considered a commodity, and the beancounters shifted the fiscal focus from brand recognition and customer retention (excellent customer service was one of the things that made this company what it was) to considering technical support a loss-generating expense that was a necessity of evil. The Indian folks were paid in a week what we made in a day, a godsend to the beancounters. So the change was made, and as a phone-based support, one of the overhead expenses was satellite time for voice traffic. Having viewed technical support as monkeys pushing buttons rather than the skilled workers that we were, the Indians were trained on a point-and-click no-thought-required interface that "solved" the problems for the technicians automatically. Failing that, (and pressured to keep call times down), the Indians transferred any call that they couldn't immediately solve with the tools given to them (or misdiagnosed completely from the beginning, as most of them had no background at all as actual computer users hence no familiarity with even rudimentary problems) back to the US, again over the satellite link. When the call arrived here and was initially diagnosed, the call was transferred back to India (as the "expensive" US techs were not allowed to take those kind of calls) over the satellite link, where the cycle continued, back and forth across the world.

The result was large numbers of calls traversing the globe multiple times for the same call over expensive satellite links to a datacenter that had a 100% attrition rate (because all the Indians wanted was a line on their resume that they worked for Big Corporation X, so they could get a job where they could utilize their CS degree skills in a place that paid better). Customers started dropping like flies because of all the transfers, answering the same point-and-click questions repeatedly over a call that had aggregated a multiple second delay because of the multiple satellite hops, trying to converse with people whom they couldn't even understand (but went by Americanized names like "Bobby"), all while costing the company MORE than their original costs of skilled US-based techs.

I also have another story of a friend who worked for another company that was located here. He was told they were sending the jobs off to India, and he was sent to train the replacements of himself and his coworkers. This went all according to plan, and on completion, his job was eliminated, and he found another job here in town. What transpired next was no less than justice (or Karma, being that it transpired in India). The company had no skilled workers left in the US, but rather just executives and some upper management. Just after the shift was made, a competitor (who also had offices in India) paid all of the newly-trained employees of my friend's company a lump sum hiring incentive and an increase in pay to come to their company. Needless to say, all of them jumped ship, and my friends (now former) company had no skilled employees left, either in India or in the US.