Thursday, February 1, 2024
When I worked at AT&T it was a regulated monopoly. It was huge. People do not understand the scale of such an enterprise. I first worked in the manufacturing part, Western Electric. As one person put it, “If we went to war and phones were bullets, Western Electric, would make them.” And plenty of them. There was a huge sense of loyalty too.
It took a lot to create a sense of urgency and a call to action, I saw it happen once. There was a fire at a central office in downtown Manhattan, seven exchanges were taken out. An exchange is represented by the three digits that follow the area code. That’s 10,000 phone numbers. Seven exchanges would be 70,000 phone numbers – in downtown New York City. The fire burned for three days. There were phone installers who had been Green Berets in Vietnam. They offered to parachute from one taller building onto the central office roof and use explosives to blow the water tower atop the central office. That’s the kind of loyalty and devotion the company engendered. Their offer was turned down.
Engineers started immediately to redesign the central office.
I was working in The Baltimore Works, which made cable and wire that went, among other things, onto ships that laid the transatlantic cables. You can still see those ships just before you descend into the Harbor Tunnel. One is appropriately named “Long Lines”. I was working in Building 70. We made all the equipment that was used to connect homes to the central offices. All the silver boxes and black round rubber casing hanging off wires and phone poles. If you go in the basement of an older home you’ll find a black hard plastic like thing with two brass cap screw on its top. It’s called a BIA128 Connector. Those brass cap things contain a carefully spaced two pieces of carbon, which acts to bleed off excess electricity thus protecting anyone using a phone and the phone equipment from getting too much electricity. They also contain a spring loaded slug of lead, which if the thing gets hit by lightning the lead will melt the spring will be released and open the circuit and thus no one gets hurt from lightning stirkes while on the phone.
The Central Offices had these protectors too, on their side of the line. They were stored in long plastic plug in panels that held 25 or 50 of them depending on the size of the panel. The back of the panel had a cable coming out of it. Typically, those cables were 10, 15, 25, or 50 feet long.
It was Thursday afternoon when we got the order for 400 of the 50 holding unit protector panels with a 250’ cable on the end. The conversation I was told went something like this:
“We don’t make a 250’ unit protector panel.”
“No, you didn’t make one before. You do now, and they will be in Manhattan Tuesday morning.”
It was a near impossible order.
The shop section chiefs were told they could ask for any workers they wanted from any job within the 7,000 person ranks and they could work for as long as they were willing and could stand up. “We’ll deal with union complaints later.” Third level managers were on the shop floor. I still remember the pride and the humngous effort it took to do that job, but we did. In writing this I shiver and it brings tears to my eyes. Such was the determined effort. Oh yes, that order was complete and in Manhattan on time.
Why do I mention this now? Because it’s an example of what you have to do to wake up a huge entity and get them to act.
Someone has been poking the sleeping giant and I think it is beginning to awaken.
There’s the House of Representatives who refuse to look at the Border Security Bill (and let’s not forget Ted Cruz and his artful comparing it and Joe Biden to Hannibal Lecter when he hadn’t even read the damn thing.)
There’s the House Committee that has voted to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary for doing his job. (At two in the morning! They aren’t so stupid as to do it when people are awake.)
and now … now what have they done?
They’ve attacked the most successful recording artist of all time.
This will not end well for them.
You don’t really want thousands and thousands of Taylor Swift fans pissed off at you, do you?
Saw this on Facebook today:
Once this fire is lit, you will not be able to contain it.
I see thousands and thousands of loyal fans asking and doing…
You have no idea what you have unleashed.