In 1983 I transferred from my job at the phone company employment office in Kansas City, Missouri, to a repair garage in Oklahoma City. I spent my first day on the job there as an "Exchange Repair Technician" riding with one of the crew members. Gene was a little older than the rest of us, and the most experienced. In the morning, he phoned into Dispatch and picked up a repair ticket and we drove over to it in his phone truck.
Gene was a wiry, slender guy, and he had a kind of slow, old school, polite demeanor typical of a lot of the native Oklahomans I ran into in the two years I lived down there. I had no experience with any of this, so as he drove, he started out my education.
"Around here," he said, "we don't talk about wires. We talk about pairs. Pairs of wires."
OK, I'm listening.
"All we really got to do is figure out what can go wrong with two wires, and fix it."
Which is about the most accurate, straightforward description of what was to be my job for the next two years that I ever heard.
A telephone circuit is a loop of wire, one side grounded, and one side with DC current on it. That's your pair of wires. They are called tip (ground) and ring (battery,) so named after their position on the typical cord board plug, that is, either the tip of the plug, or the ring, the circular band of metal below the tip, and insulated from it. I confess it was a long time before I understood that. What can go wrong is the two wires might be touching, which is a short, or either one might be broken, which we called an open, or either side might be touching the ground, as in the metal sheath surrounding phone cables. Also, one of the wires might be touching one of the wires on a different pair. A telephone cable has a lot of pairs of wires in it--the amount varies, from, say, 25, or 50, or 100, and so on, up to hundreds. You might say, "the houses on that street are fed by a 25 pair cable."
So, that was my world, at work. Fixing wires in cable, or in house wiring. That and fixing broken telephones, replacing cords--this was back when the phone companies, the Baby Bells, owned the telephones.
Some of the work was inside houses, some of it outside. People were glad to see us on their door step. We were heroes. Actually it was kind of fun, and I liked thinking that each evening when I went home after a day at work, the town was a little bit better than it was when I woke up that morning. That was about the only job I ever had where I could say that.
One day I was seventeen and visiting my girlfriend and her girlfriends where she lived with her sister in an apartment in Oakland when the telephone guy came. He was an Asian hippie type, sort of like Tommy Chong, and was clearly admired by the girls. He showed us this trick where he'd dial a secret number and hang up and the phone would ring. He covered the dial with his hand so we couldn't see the number. I tried to guess by listening to the dial as it noisily rotated back to start, but never managed it. The girls were giggly and thought he was the coolest.
ReplyDeleteHa. There is that aspect of it--knowing all that secret stuff. The number he dialed is called "ring back." Also, with that test, before hanging up, there is a tone, and after that you press all the digits (on a touch-tone phone) from 1-9 + 0, and if the equipment recognized them in that order, it responded with two beeps. So, now you know the dial on the phone isn't "mutilating digits." (the two frequencies assigned to each numbered button are within spec for a long enough duration.) The ringback number was jealously guarded, for reasons you might well imagine. The tests we used most frequently were that, and ANI (automatic number identification) and quiet termination, which essentially routed your call in the normal manner, only to a silent termination, allowing you to decide if there was noise or cross-talk on the line, without having to consider "the other end" of a call. The very high-tech way we determined if static was coming from the aerial drop wire was to hook up to the line outside, dial the quiet termination, and then beat the drop wire with a long pole, to see if that induced static.
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