I'm an employee of AT&T and the following is just my opinion... (they like it when I say that)
I haven't blogged in a while, everything has been so busy. We're still working on our remodeling project in Cullman. We've done a lot more work on the utility room and it's slowly coming together. I still need to sand the sheetrock on the ceiling, ugh! It's one of those projects that is filled with dread. I'll probably wet sand it first, just to keep the dust down. My long weekends, due to working on Sunday and getting Friday off, have come to an end. The company took those away from us since Friday was such a busy day in all the other turfs(not ours)! We generally get sent to work in Birmingham or West Shelby County anyway. It isn't something we enjoy doing, the awful traffic on Highway 280 always causes an hour to an hour and a half drive. So at least three hours of our day is spent driving.
Travel time doesn't seem to be as important as it used to be. The only thing of importance is to cover any Uverse troubles that come in to be dispatched. Our group only has a four-hour clearing time, so we have to be ready to go at all times. It's kind of like the Ghostbusters movie when Annie Potts hit the button and shouted, "We got one"! Alarms sounded and the crew took off for the chase. When a trouble comes in for us, we get an immediate text, an email(like we're sitting there looking at it, right), and sometimes a phone call. I know it sounds like an efficient system, but often, it's like a false alarm. So, as you work, you have to keep acknowledging all the text messages. Most of the time, when you arrive to put out the "fire", no one is out of service. The wire technician found some reason to drop a ticket to dispatch. My opinion is that they do that a lot, to protect themselves from reprimand due to the "30 day" policy on repeated reports. That ticket is handed off to me, to be my problem and not theirs. It would even be great, if there were an option for troubles which were NOT "out of service" that wouldn't fall into the four-hour window requirement. Many evenings we have to work late, on issues that could have been much easier corrected in the daylight. For all the preaching we hear about safety, I rarely hear anything about the dangers of working on telecommunication wiring at night. Just hunting a rural residence, finding a place to park, negotiating through yard obstacles, and the list goes on and on, all are difficult and time multiplying after dark.
Speaking of the company, I thoroughly enjoyed being off for two weeks at Christmas. Granted, I worked harder putting up sheetrock, but it's always good to be away. NO, that's not right, it's great to be away. One of the technicians was driving my truck right before Christmas and the power steering went out. It was towed into the garage in Birmingham, and still hasn't returned. I've been "hopping" trucks since then. If someone is "off" that day, I get to drive theirs. Our group has no spare trucks and at the moment, we're even minus four bucket trucks, which are at the garage for various problems. I traveled to the garage to retrieve my hand tools early this week from my marooned vehicle, and was shocked to see the number there. If the garage was a hospital, there are no spare beds, inside the fence was full. So, I understand now that the problem isn't just the time it takes to put on a new power steering pump, it's having a mechanic available to do it. My supervisor said they told him that it might be back next week, with heavy emphasis on "might".
I'll try to do a better job of posting more often. Thanks for stopping by.
