Communications: Voice, Radio and Data - The Good & Bad as the Tech

Okay, how about the other point of view as the tech? If you don't know what I am talking about please read "The Good & Bad as the customer" to get up to speed. Anyway, if there are any phone techs who come in here, let hear your stories. Lets talk about your most extreme customers. The biggest surprise you ever had upon arrival good and bad.
Have you had any that were way too angry, rude or who claim to know more than you? How about the overly curious customer who is in your face every second? What about the worst place you ever had to go?

How about the very best story you have to tell. Your favorite customer you ever had. Ever had one give you a gift of some sort besides money that is unless it was a huge amount? How about take you to lunch? Or the coolest place you ever had like a mansion or my personal favorite the Potato Chip factory. How about customers that go totally out of their way to do something nice for you like call your boss and brag about you. Maybe they wrote a nice letter to the CEO about you.

Things like this should make for some interesting posts at the very least. Most everyone should have some story to tell. Please make sure we keep this clean and respectable. I do not want to delete or edit posts, I just want to try something fun. Also, please lets leave real names of particular people out of it as well.

I didn't actually give any examples of any of my good and bad customers. I do have a few that really stand out in my mind.

Since the bad always stand out the most I will start there. We all get angry customers, nature of the job. After all, your not there because everything is working perfectly.

I had one place where I walked in, announced myself. "Hello, I'm Phonetek... I'm here to check your phone lines." The response I got from the lady who must have smoked 2 cartons a day was. "And I have a gun and I'm not afraid to use it." Being calm and cool I simply said "Have a nice day, good luck with your phone lines." As I walked out she said she was only joking but since I wasn't laughing I continued out the door.
The other under the "Bad" catagory is a meat packing plant. When you walk in the place with all the beef hanging up it was clean, fresh smelling and you could eat off the floor. Where the phone box is, now that's another story all together. A man who reminded me of one of the good ol' boys in the movie Deliverance brought me down to the basement. Not only was the stench of rotting meat enough to make you gag but they also had an amonia spill on top of it. I had to do what I had to do. I started my cable spice, I sat on a small cable reel while I sorted the wires. A rat about the size of a poodle ran right over my legs. That was it for me. Not only did I get a nasty headache, feel nautious from the odor but I will also never eat that brand of meat again in my life. The man there said that I lasted longer than any of the previous 7 phone guys that came there. He thought it was hilarious, to this day I have refused to ever go there again.
Okay, now the good. As I said, my favorite place is the local potato chip factory. Everytime I go there they always load me up with my favorite snacks. I must say that they taste way better fresh from the factory than they are when you get them at the store. It's the one place that I pray the phones break just so I can come back.
Aside from going to a business, it's always an adventure when you go to a home. You never know what to expect. To my surprize it happens way more than one would think. You get to the door and the person answers it in the buff. Most of the time when you check out their lines there was no trouble at all, it's like they were bored and decided to mess with the phone guy. Then again, there are some that could care less what you think by seeing them as they entered the world and they look at you as the strange one for being clothed.

As I said it's always an adventure!

i was a green as green can be newbie, had just been out of pole climbing for a few weeks. i was 25 and i am a girl. i got dispatched to a very affluent neighborhood, filled with mansions and old huge farm estates The address I was given was supposedly one of these farms. When I actually found the address, it was a shack that was so overgrown with weeds and ivy, I had to do a triple take to make sure it was even a residence and not an abandoned barn. As I got out of my truck, it was so overgrown that I grabbed my layup stick out of the back of my van and used it as a sickle to clear the brush and try and scare any snakes out of the immediate area. I knocked at what was a partially rotted door, and a man that i'll fondly call "lurch" answered. blaring in the background was some eerie classical music. i looked down at the floor as i walked in (i usually do this to make sure i am not tracking mud into someone's brand new white carpet) what had been beige tiles were only beige where feet had been in the past fifty years, along with bird droppings and whatever other kind of droppings you can imagine. i asked what the problem was, and he mumbled that there was a problem in the bedroom. he pointed me in the general direction and went back to his bloodletting or paper reading, i'm not sure which..LOL. as i opened the bedroom door, there was a hole, ok, lets sat a quarter of the room was gone. sunlight beamed in. all i saw was a blank wallplate on one of the walls and settled on to the corner of a dirty old uncovered mattress to begin my work. as i parked my butt, squirrels scattered out from within the mattress. i am hopping around the room like a maniac and all the time this loud classical music is booming into the room. as any phoneman knows, if you look around the edge of a wallplate there are tell tell signs of whether roaches reside within, i immediately knew, it was go time. i tactfully pryed the faceplate off with my "dogkiller" and there they came. roaches, eggs, and all the other debris that had accumulated over the years. i ran back to my truck (sickle in tow) to get icky pick wipes to try and wipe the wires free of all the roach eggs. no luck, after a breif reading the wires went nowhere, which meant, new wire had to be run. dreading pioneering any more of this lovely property, me and my sickle took to the back nine. the nid was directly in back of the half-room i had been working in. had i known that, i would have scurried throught the wall just like the squirrels did. i was desperate, and i am not proud of this, i took the spool of wire and dutifully connected the iw, tie wrapped beautifully to the nid and tossed that sucker throught the hole in the wall, stapled it to the baseboard, connected the jack, called lurchy in and had him test his phone. shoved a bill under his nose which i think he signed with an "x" and hightailed it outta there.

never got a complaint, so i am assuming that lurchy is still talking on his phone today.

as phonetek said, other that the naked people answering the door and everyone knowing just enough to be dangerous, one other incident stands out in my mind.

i was working on a sunday, which was always gravy. most folks dont even remember they made the appointment, so its no access cards on the door all day, but some folks dont remember and "are home" or so they think. i knocked on an apartment door at 8:00 AM, my first appointment. i heard groans and yelling and then the door parted and someone yelled..come the *&%$ in!!! armed with the trusty dog killer again, i drew it from my belt and entered. wading through the room with no light i stumbled on beer cans and wine bottles. people were sleeping everywhere and in all positions..i think some were even hanging upsidedown..like bats...LOL. i yelled out and asked if anyone could tell me where the problem was, a girl answered from a far room that the problem was there. i opened the door and she pointed to the phone. i had to move a dresser to get to the jack and when i did, i obviously disturbed something that i shouldnt have, white powder started pouring out on to the carpet. i see this and state that i need to leave immediately. the girl starts crying, i am freaking out because i am sure i am going to lose my job in some way or another, she wakes up some guy, he starts yelling and i just start backing out of the room and the apartment...scared to death, i called my foreman and explained what happened. he says all is ok, just glad i told him. god forbid what could have happened.

the only other wierd one i had was placing a new terminal in the back room of a funeral home, in the embalming section....freeeeaaaakkky!

oh, well, all in the day of a life i guess. i would love to hear more stories from other techs!!

thanks for the opportunity Tek!!!!!

Wow, and I thought I'd been in some bad houses. I've had a few of those single wide trailers and stuff, where you have to have the wasp spray and maybe a snake killer with you to go near, but never anything that bad. OUCH! BTW, anyone know why someone with a $12k mobile home would want an alarm system? Oh well, I don't sell them, I just install them.

Phonetek, hope you're back at your post soon.

Purplepickles, are you still an outside tech?


I was working very late at night during student reconnect time at an apartment building trying to install new service to a college student. (This was before TSPS, ANI, etc.) I was at the right terminal box but didn't have my dial tone so I called the test table (test desk in some parts---I'm dating myself) for help getting dial tone. Apparently the cable records were incorrect so the test table tech (AKA deskman) had me connect my butt set to a cable pair that was being used and asked me to get the number from the subscriber. They were talking on it.

I monitored the line for several minutes before breaking in to verify the number. There was a guy and a girl talking with the guy trying to impress the young lady with how involved and important he was as a student radical and how the FBI had a tap on his line, and they were probably listening to his conversation at that very moment. He was also trying to get the girl to meet him later that evening.

The more I heard the more I dreaded having to interrupt the call to announce that, "this is the phone company. Is this 382-1515?", supporting everything the guy was saying to impress this young lady.

The guy replied that it was indeed that number. I thanked him and dropped off. He immediately proclaimed to the girl, "....see, my phone IS tapped, just like I said!" At this point the young lady became was very impressed with this guy and agreed to meet him later.

To this day it annoys me to think that they probably met later and that I probably helped him get lucky.

sudsman...that is toooo funny!!! and yes, i am still out here...standing in the freezing rain today..BRRRRRR

Purplepickles.....standing in the freezing rain....the part of the job that you've just gotta love. I think of all the jobs I had while working for the phone company my favorite was as a residence installer. How long have you been at it?

You mentioned working in a funeral home in the embalming section. That is freaky, isn't it? I hated those kinds of jobs.

In my PBX repair days we would occasionally take call-outs at the city morgue late at night. The guy who worked there overnight had an ususually bizarre sense of humor. The door to get access into the telephone room was in the rear of the morgue and there was a lock box for the phone company techs to get in after hours. You had to pass through a room that had an examination table and most of the time had a corpse on it. When the night guy knew you were coming he'd tie a string onto the arm of the corpse and hide. When the repair tech entered the room the morgue guy would pull on the string making the corpse' arm hit you as you walked by. Now that's freaky!!!

Sudsman reminded me of a good one but sad one. When I worked for a certain LD carrier we used to monitor T1's for traffic before we took them down for testing. Well, on one channel of the T1 there was a married couple talking and judging from the conversation the husband was out of town on a business trip. We listened for a while waiting for them to get off the phone but they kept blabbering. It was too tempting for my partner I guess. He listened and eventually got the names of each of them. Then he goes off hook and says to the girl "Hey baby is that Frank?" She said "What?" The husband said "Who the bleep was that?" My partner said "Haven't you told him about us yet? Now seems as good as time as any!" The husband said "I KNEW IT! I KNEW YOU WERE CHEATING ON ME! When I get back I'm filing for divorce!" The woman was doing nothing but crying and screaming "I swear I do not know this man!"

Needless to say that was a very cruel thing to do. He took a perfectly happy couple and probably caused their demise as the last thing either of them probably expected was a goofy phone guy to tap in. I have played my share of jokes on people but never anything like that.

I think the worst one I have done is on one rainy day I was in a net pop and grabbed someone's dial tone to call one of my switch techs. As I was on the phone line a person had picked it up to make a call and heard us talking on it. I had told the person I was with the phone company and I was on the pole. I told her their was a problem due to the storm so it would be dangerous for them to pick up the phone if it rings. I told her that if it rings let it ring or I could get electrocuted. So of course I hung up and immediately rang her line. As people cannot resist but to answer a ringing phone, she answered it and I started screaming bloody murder. All she said was "Oh my god!" and hung up the phone. My tech at the switch just about soiled himself laughing. Heehee! That may be an old bit but people still fall for it!

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! oh my gosh...toooo funny. the cheating/divorce one was just mean..but the storm one cracked me up. i have a ton more i can tell..especially on strike..management pranks..i'll write more later..it sure is fun to share this stuff!!! only the telephone guy (or girl) in my case knows...LOL

Phonetek: Great story!!! To this day I'll bet that poor lady thinks she electrocuted you.

I knew a test desk technician that used to call customers after cable trouble was cleared to let them know that the problem was fixed. But before he ended the call he always told the customer "......your trouble is cleared. Now what I need for you to do is to get a paper bag and place it over all the phones in your house so we can blow all the remaining dust and dirt out of the line. You'll need to stand far away from the phone when we do this. Wait about ten minutes and then you can use the phone again." He claims they always cooperated.