I have several new ideas for blog posts so hopefully I'll be a little more punctual. The first concerns my unbeloved company AT&T. I read online that they are okay with blogs as long as the following is stated; "I am an AT&T employee and the following is my own opinion". Now that the legalese is out of the way, let the blog truly begin...
I have written before how AT&T is so concerned with employee job stats that everything suffers from customer service to outside plant quality. My supervisor told me this week that I was too "customer friendly", that I was "old school". I needed to get with the new AT&T and act like a monkey doing everything they said. Most of my customers would disagree with that statement. Anyway, safety is another issue they toss at us with the proper amount to protect them legally if we screw up. In other words, it is often lip service. I'll give you my example, sorry my opinion on it.
I transfered to Chelsea, Alabama in the summer of 2010. Within a short time, I found an unsafe electrical condition in downtown Vincent, Alabama. Vincent is the small town whose residents are in an uproar over a planned strip mine. There have been several articles in the Birmingham news and if you drive through town it seems each resident has a sign in their yard expressing their opinion on the matter.
Back to my story, Vincent, like every other small town, decorates during Christmas time and to make matters easy, they leave the poorly attached and dangerous electrical attachments hanging for next year. It's like the guy you see with the icicle lights on his house in July, all he's got to do in December is plug them up! I have a pet peeve about electricity in my work space so I told my supervisor what I had found and the reason it needed to be taken care of. I worked with an employee in Piedmont, Alabama who was shocked while working in their downtown area. He survived but had some nerve damage and was forced to retire. I believe Piedmont helped his retirement in the form of monetary damages, but he could have been killed!
A month later, while working in Vincent, I noticed the situation still existed. I drove to the town hall and spoke with the two ladies working in the office and the maintenance manager just happened to be there. I relayed my concerns and they promised to inform the mayor when he returned from a trip on the following Monday. I thanked them and also told the Supervisor what I had done.
I allowed them what I deemed was time enough, about three months, and found the situation unchanged. I was a little annoyed! I took pictures and emailed them to my Supervisor, stating that it needed to be escalated to a higher power to help the city comply with the electrical code.
We're approaching the month of May and if you drive through Vincent today and look up at the poles this is what you'll see...
Maybe Vincent will need the strip mine to help pay for the eventual law suit!
My other complaint(read opinion) is that some maintenance jobs require two or more people to complete. It could be for various reasons... time, difficulty, but mostly it would be for safety. Such as working in an unsafe environment where more than one person is required to perform the job in a safe and effective manner. Well, it has been deemed from above that there will no longer be "helper" tickets issued. We've had more than one technician told to just "handle it"! We've also been told to make a customer report on a number nearby if we just MUST have someone! Sorry, that is a lie! That customer didn't report trouble... CHANGE YOUR SYSTEM AT&T!!!
One more for the road... Again, in Vincent, we've had a 30 mile copper cable giving trouble for years. Finally, we noticed recently that contractors were working on a new fiber fed box near the end of that route. They even put down gravel to park our trucks on, how thoughtful...
The problem with the engineering is that it is being placed in a double blind 50mph inside curve!
If you managed to "back in" which is what we are supposed to do, here is your view trying to pull out.
Safe... I think not! Sometime the truth (opinion) hurts!
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