My Job during the Work Stoppage

The Frame Tech Total Body Workout Program
(It's not Phone Company "Central Office," it's a Health Club!)
This page has been screened and contains no Proprietary information.

Note -- this is the highlight of a period of personal despair, towards the end of the dot-com recession.

May 2004 -- The CWA went on strike, and all the "managers" were reassigned to cover the union jobs.
(When I took the job, they told me that although I was in Sales, I was technically a "manager". Aha.)

My Team was assigned to a central office in one corner of Silicon Valley.

The folks on the picket lines were very professional, friendly and courteous.

These are my favorite blocks to tie down because they're new,
well marked and easy to use.

Unfortunately,
since they're new,
they're at one end of the
Vertical side,
so every jumper is a
couple of hundred feet long.

Maybe they're not my favorite after all...

Our team was just tossed together, and learning to work together was fun. I'm not publishing last names to protect everyone's privacy.

Mary ~~Xxxxx~~ and Bob ~~Xxxxx~~
go over the very first batch
of work orders,
highlighting the cable pairs
and locations to make it easier
for us to find them.

They also interpreted the work and wrote in plain English
what we needed to do,
so that we'd avoid mistakes.

In this Central Office, there are not many soldered connections. They've been replaced with wire wrap blocks.

WHEW.

"Which wire do I Pull?"

"The RED one!"

"Which RED ONE?"

"The One In The MIDDLE!"

There's a huge database that contains a record for every wire in the world, and an identifying number for the location of each end.

Ah, if it were only that easy.

This block is well numbered and easy to work on. But there are a lot of termination points that have been around for fifty years, and have supported more than one generation of equipment, so the numbers aren't always easy!

Our Team's assignment was to pull jumpers on the Main Distribution Frame. It's a long steel structure, about 350 feet long and 15 feet high.

This was our first look at it,
before we found the light switches.

This is the Horizontal Side of the Frame.
Every piece of wire in the central office
terminates on this side of the Frame.
They're called the Central Office wires.

This is the Vertical Side of the Frame, where every wire leaves the Central Office and heads out into the Local Exchange area.

They're called the Customer Premise wires.

I should have taken another picture
after we found the light switches.
Oh well.

The frame goes all the way down to the far wall.

Our Mission is to pull jumper wires from little pins on the Horizontal Side over to little pins on the Vertical Side.

Both the Horizontal and the Vertical Side have many different generations of termination blocks.

Those little blocks are called 'coils', and they act like fuses to protect the Central Office equipment from lightning strikes or high voltage shorts.

As a Frame Tech, you put jumpers
on and off the blocks.

All Day.

I figure we each walked between 8 and 10 miles a day, stopping every 20 or 50 feet to climb a ladder a few times or do 10 squats.
It's a real workout.

This is Vicky ~~Xxxxx~~, the Frame Manager
for this Central Office.

Our team was really lucky to have her in charge.
She had been a Frame Tech earlier in her career,
and is also a Frame Training Manager.

She was really cool, and was very patient with us.
I'm sure it was a real challenging time for her.
She's going to have a baby, and was sick
with a Bad Cold, but still pulled 12 hour shifts with us and spent a good deal of time on the phone
helping folks in other Central Offices as well.

She deserves a bonus!

In this picture she's sorting our work.

This little piece of paper tells you what to do.

(I deliberately blurred it, just in case.
No customer information is on it!.)

It tells you where the terminating blocks are for each end of wire that needs to be pulled.
It also has a lot of other information that I'm sure is very important.

That's me on the left,
and Jack ~~Xxxxx~~ on the right.

We have wireless phones with headsets so that we can talk on the phone with the outside guys who are on poles or working at a customer site. We would help them find good cable pairs or verify that a line was working.

That was my favorite part
of this job, because you really feel like you're helping somebody get the job done.

Jim ~~Xxxxx~~
was the first one up a ladder.

Ladder Climbing is a big part
of the workout program.

If you're experienced
and/or smart,
you may only need
to climb the ladder
a few times at each location.

Personally, I had
a hard time being smart
about this, and kept forgetting important things like
the piece of paper
with the jumper location,
or my pliers,
or the actual jumper wire.
Every time you forget something is another trip up and down the ladder!

Here, Jack is demonstrating
proper form for stretching,
while preparing to wire wrap.

Squats and Leg Extensions
are a common part
of the Frame Tech Workout routine.

All right!

Tools On!

Work Orders In Hand!

Let's GO!

It's time to start
The Frame Tech Total Body Workout Program!

Arm extensions are a big part of the workout as well.

If you have a partner on the other side of the frame, you pass jumpers back and forth by reaching all the way through.

It's really fun when you're up on a ladder.
(That's Vicky.)

Jack
finds his
first wire!

Here,
Jack demonstrates
how you get a good triceps and shoulder workout while pulling
a jumper out of
the Frame.

In order to make it easier to find cables,
we put cheat sheets all over the place.

They have the outside cable number,
and the vertical location number
where it can be found.

Here's Bob,
looking for the right block (on Day Four.)

On our First day, we spent a great deal of time just walking around the frame trying to figure out where things were.

Sure, the computer might say that jumper 230-02-05-23 is at location 270F, but sometimes it just ain't so.

And those ~~XXXX~~ (Miscellaneous Equipment) blocks can be a real challenge to find. They're always way up high, so you get to do the Ladder Climb exercise.

Walking Around the Frame is a large part of the Frame Tech Total Body Workout. Each lap around is about 750 feet,
or a sixth of a mile.
You can easily walk around three times
on a single jumper -- more if you leave a tool or that piece of paper
on the wrong side.

When you get tired of doing squats to get down to
level A, B and C, you can sit.

This is good
for the abs.

Jumper wire has a hard plastic sheath, so that it will slide around and not get tangled up.

Right.

This exercise
works your
back and rear.

It's important to have
good tunes playing
during your workout,
so we switched the C.O.
speakers over to KFOG.

Ah,
'Acoustic Sunrise'
on Sunday Morning!

Did I mention
that you spend a lot of time
climbing up and down
ladders?

Here's the view from the top row on the Horizontal Side of the Frame. This is where all the ~~XXXX~~ and ~~XXXX~~ blocks are.

I always wanted to
make it to the top!

Did I mention
that you spend a lot of time climbing ladders?

Here's Vicky
pulling a jumper out of the Frame.

To do this exercise properly, extend your arm out and up over your shoulder, then pull down on the wire, bringing your hand down
to your side.

Mary took charge
of the computer, printing out work orders and entering them back in when we were done.

She told us what to do next, sorta like a personal trainer.

Looking up all the time
is good for your
neck muscles.

Here's Jim working his triceps
by pulling a jumper down.

It's important to keep your
back straight when doing this

Jack shows one of the more esoteric exercises in the Frame Tech Total Body Workout program.

That's the Frame Tech Total Body Workout program!

It's not a Central Office, it's a Health Club. And there's no membership fee.

In fact, WE GOT PAID for it!
(The strike was over way too soon!)

Respectfully submitted,
Wally Bryant