Retirement and Beyond

I retired from AT&T in 2000.  I worked for a while for Marty at his Jewelry store in McKinney.  We worked well together and this was shortly after Aidan was born.  Part of my job was to babysit Aidan while Heather did the books for the store.  He usually fell asleep on my chest and it was great for both of us.

The Jewelry store closed, and I started looking for other work.  

Aztec Communications

I found Aztec Communications. They were based out of Houston and had a contract with some co-locator in Texas to install equipment in ATT central offices.

A co-locator is a small telco who competes with ATT for phone and data lines business. 

1984 Consent Decree

According to a court judgment in the 80's, ATT has to lease space in their central offices to smaller co-locators. Along with the space, ATT must sell the co-locator a large conduit into their “cage”. A cage is the physical location in the ATT office where the co-locator installs and maintains their equipment. It is actually a wire mesh enclosure that the co-locator can lock so that ATT employees can't get access and sabotage the co-locator's equipment. 

The purpose of the 1984 Consent Decree was to break up ATT's monopoly on phone service. At the time of the Decree, you could not get phone service from anyone but ATT. The Decree made it easier for smaller phone companies to compete. These were the co-locators.

I think the co-locator Aztec was contracted with was North Star Communications. (Don't hold me to that). Aztec would send their crews in to install all the equipment, power supplies, and test out all the cross-connections. The crew I was on did the testing.  It was pretty interesting and I learned a lot I hadn't known before. We would work in Houston, then when we finished, we would go to San Antonio, then to Austin. I think those were the only 3 places I worked. Once that project was over, Aztec let most of us go. First time I had ever been unemployed, or laid-off. BUMMER.

AFL

AFL was the acronym for America Fujicura Limited.  I worked for them for 6 or 7 years.  I had a company truck, and drove all over the DFW area installing and maintaining telco equipment. AFL was a company that did colocation in AT&T buildings. I was involved in testing and maintaining that equipment, making cross connects and installing new equipment if it needed to be installed. 

It was a great job and I enjoyed it. I had a boss here in the Dallas area that kind of left me alone and just let me do my thing and didn't get on my case a lot unless I screwed up something. 

At one point AFL had a contract with a regional (Think SouthWestern Bell, maybe it was Northern Bell Co.) telephone company up in New Hampshire. That telephone company’s employees were going out on strike and AFL was hired to bring in people to replace striking employees. 

That's commonly called being a scab and I was one of the scabs. 

That was the first time I was ever a strike breaker. I didn't like it but I did like the money. The strike went on for nearly 3 months I think. Our group was assigned to Manchester New Hampshire to work. We took the job and stayed there for about 11 or 12 weeks. 

It was quite contentious having to drive into the central office that we were working out of each day. The strikers were allowed to picket in front of the gates for the central office and we had to drive our cars through their picket line to get into work in the building. They usually yelled at us and screamed obscenities and stuff like that but that's normal when you're working as a scab. 

It was a good experience and a bad experience. I had been a union man all of my 30 years with AT&T and prior to that with New York telephone and I hated the thought of not supporting my fellow workers in their strike. We did it because of the money and because the customers of that phone company up there in Manchester needed service and they needed repair when stuff went out of service so that was one of the reasons that we justified being scabs. Like I said it wasn't fun but it was good money. 

Snow of the Century (Well at least my Century)

While I was in Manchester working it began to snow. It was in the middle of the winter and it began to snow really really hard. I think we ended up with drifts like five or six feet deep. The road crews and everybody that maintained the highways were just unbelievably good. They would have crews out constantly plowing the highways and side streets and getting everything ready for people to go to work in the mornings. 

I got stuck a couple of times because I had a rental car and I didn't have very much equipment in the car. Almost everyone that lived in that area carried shovels and sand and rock salt and all the stuff you needed in their trunk to get out of a snow drift. The couple of times I did get trapped in the snow, several people, other scabs and just people on the road would come over and help dig me out. They had the tools so it was a good experience that everyone helped each other out even though we were scabs. 

While I was up there I called Mimi and asked her to come up and visit. She did but the snow had almost all melted and she got to see a bunch of dirty brown snow, so it wasn't much of a vacation for her but we did get to travel around New Hampshire a little bit and see some of the sights. She did get to have a lobster roll.

A lobster roll is a hot dog bun with lobster salad on it. It's a great sandwich type dinner or lunch. The Lobster was fresh and the salad that they made there was great. Mimi liked it and we had a good time dining out. The seafood was fresh because we were close to the Atlantic.