He worked for Mountain Bell - well, for AT&T, too, before the break-up.
He was a network engineer, and he worked at the local exchange. There was the massive switch itself, always clicking away its hundreds of thousands of rotary relays. Five foot tall lead-acid batteries all tied together with 0000 gauge copper beams. The dial-tone generator, a six-inch wide cylinder filled part way with mercury and turned by a DC motor. The basement trunk interface room, where the town's trunk lines splayed out from their thick cables to hundreds (or was it thousands?) of tiny pairs.
I particularly loved the parts room, where the linemen would restock their trucks. There were so many mysterious little tidbits and gadgets. I loved removing the mystery, one part at a time, bugging linemen and switch techs with questions about each. They'd let me take some of the cheap parts and scrap wire home. My sister and I had our own little phone system between our rooms made from those parts and two operator handsets that had worn past Bell standards.
Oh, Kickie, you've gone and made me get all wistful. |
