The good old days, with a Lucent 5ESS, fingerless gloves, waxed twine, and miles of cable racks!
LOL yeah. We got a national level engineering exemption in writing that our racks didn't have to have waxed string in them (delivered as a completed unit to the CO - and that's how I learned how much it costs to bolt a wooden crate around a rack and how big it can be to fit on a FexEx flight... hahaha... yup... we FedEx'd entire racks of gear...) and guess what the union guys did when we showed up to install them?
Cut every single tie wrap out on their own and re-did all of them on overtime, claiming the tie wraps were a safety issue. LOL LOL LOL.
The executive VP that got our exemption was fit to be tied (pun intended) but gave up and just budgeted to let them do it at every site.
We didn't care. We delivered every single one of them, as ordered, with a copy of the exemption attached, to every site. "Sign here for delivery, please..."
Still wasn't as funny as the NYNEX guy who literally set the phone I called him on, down on a table in the CO during a major outage that HE caused... saying he was going to go take his one hour union coffee break. In the middle of the outage. Hahaha.
There was also the time a 350 lb executive VP of a bank came flying across the room faster than any NFL wide receiver and about tackled me for thinking I could open one of our crates and get to work installing his stuff in Cincinnati. I'm standing there with my snips about to cut the bands off the thing and get to work just like anywhere else.
Nobody had warned me they were a Teamsters shop.
I just wanted to get something done that day. We didn't.
I left and went and watched an afternoon baseball game and charged him for every hour I sat there doing nothing but drinking beer and eating peanuts. Whoever had that important union job to cut four bands off a crate and slide the gear three feet into position on the floor of the bank's data center, apparently did it overnight.
THAT silliness... I definitely don't miss in telecom. NYNEX is gone, that bank is gone, and AT&T is forever... so I guess I don't have to not give names anymore, but I won't. They were all interesting customers.
Of course non-union shops had their problems too. We'd been shipping stuff to Verizon for a while when someone noticed the racks in their photos weren't ours.
So next visit my boss at the time goes with another FE on-site and literally finds out they we're buying fully-racked gear from us, trucking it to the sites, and then some rack standard had changed, so their guys would unrack it all, put it in their racks, and put our racks out back in the dumpster.
Once we let the group know that was buying the stuff and reminded them they were paying for rack and stack... amazingly the next order was for all the gear to just be boxed up. LOL.
The waste of time and money in telecom doesn't touch the waste of time and money we saw in our government contracts, but it was trying hard to keep up!
