Miles and Miles!!!!!

Trying to keep a customer happy was a top priority and most of the time if you kept them informed they were happy. But for some of them you were the Company and they didn't like The Company so they didn't like you either. This was always a problem, of course every customer was different, some were very understanding some, not so much. One of the biggest problems was the distance from the Central Office, where the Dial Tone originated from, to the house. Many times over 10 miles. Now this means that you have 10 miles of copper wire between the CO and the house where the service was working. So you have a lot of ground to cover and at times that can cause many problems.

For the most part the trouble would usually be at a point that could be reached by you and other technicians. This helped in some instances because you may know of a location where there had been trouble before. These places were always good places to check first. Many were places that needed rebuilding due to weather or ants or other insects. But many times you just did not have the time to do the rebuild because of the trouble reports that your area had. So these areas were left for repair at a future date, you would just worry about getting your Telephone # good to your customer and move on to the next repair ticket. Other times you would be unable to get to the trouble location, such as if the trouble was in a buried section of cable. You would prove this by isolating this section between two ready access pedestals where you could cut the pair in half and do a test to prove the trouble. Then you had to move the # to a spare pair in the cable if possible, place a temporary wire to get around the defective section of cable, or get a contractor to dig up and then fix the cable or replace the cable.

Back when I first started we did a lot of digging up the cable and fixing it. Of course we had to try to figure out where to dig? This could be accomplished by the test equipment we carried, we would measure the trouble with this equipment then dig at that measured point to be able to fix the problem. This of course was the most time consuming and expensive process to repair the trouble.

The Company wanted you to fix the trouble in less than 2 Hours which was always a challenge. I really enjoyed my job for the most part, I was basically on my own in a Company Truck driving from one job to another all day long. So I didn't have a supervisor hanging over my shoulder trying to tell me what to do and when to do it. I was on my own and that was really nice.