My first job after I returned from the Army.

Back in the seventies I worked at a local gas station pumping gas also changing and repairing tires.

The pumps we had did have a setting for over $.99 9/10th. When price went over that set price to half and pump half as much or twice as much to get the right amount of gas for the price. I just got a headache trying to remember which it was.

There was gas rationing with odd and even days off your license plate and lines down the street.  Minimum wage was only about $3.00

I worked so many hours there that I said the name of the business when I picked up the phone at home.

My early work years

I took a job installing fences around the Plymouth, MA area.

It turns out the boss was hard to work for, and he was not a great person when he had a drink or two. I witnessed him losing his temper. (really scary guy)

It was hard work digging post holes. Then the job was to tamp the dirt down to make sure the post would not budge. It should be noted that we had to get more dirt as the dirt we dug out of the hole was not enough to refill the hole.

He also offered to give me a raise if I could bet him in arm wrestling, or if I lost take a pay cut.  I declined and quit soon after. Let me say again scary guy and no matter what always critical about every little thing.  

When the help they send you is no help at all.

Special note When I found out who was going to be helping I said expected issues.

This is about a useless co-worker who was foisted on me. The reasoning was that I was buried under trouble and move requests. They assigned some of the move requests for him to complete.

The ISSUE!!!!   They were scheduled to be moved on Wednesday, and he relocated their phones around lunch time on Tuesday.  He also never contacted them to see if he could move them early.

So, on Tuesday they all called the help desk and opened trouble tickets saying that their phones had stopped working. I got those tickets, and I dropped what I was doing to move them back on Tuesday. Then the next day Wednesday I had to move them to their new locations as scheduled.

Another painful work experience

This is about a useless co-worker who was foisted on me when I had to disconnect and      reconnect phones and computers for ten cubes that were being torn down to replace the carpet under them.

To complete this task, we had to remove jacks and pull the cable out of them to reuse. So, what should have happened was labeling the cables before cutting the jacks off, to reuse when the cubes we reinstalled.

What did happen was he just cut the jacks off without labeling the cables and then disappeared so when I prepared to reinstall the cabling and make sure correct phone numbers and network connections.

He left me on my own so I had to tone each cable before I could reinstall the cables. That required me to take a walk back and forth between the cables and the phone / network room halfway across the building. This added unnecessary hours to my work to get a good result.

Working with IT Director

The same IT director I posted previously mysteriously thought we could slit shrink tubing to wrap cables we had forgot to put the cables threw before we terminated them in the network cable cabinets in the new N.O.C.

I requested that he show me how that would work. That did not go as well as he thought it would.

Phone installer blog!

Please note this company no longer exists!

We once had a new director assigned to IT. He was always asking questions about how many phone installs we could do in a day. During this point in history all phones required a wire back to the phone switch.

So that being said if the new install was into a location in the building that had wiring already previously installed and everything went smoothly one install every hour and a half would not be impossible.

However if there was not wiring in place and depending on the location there is no real way to set a time to complete the install.