This little guy above is representative of me trying to create these pages. I keep reminding myself that if I can begin to prepare a homepage, then anyone can prepare their own homepage.
I am retired from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. That is one great company to work for. I worked there thirty five years before retiring. I can truly say, I never had a job that I didn't like. I thought every job I had with the telephone company was the best job a person could ever have. I first started as a lineman working unlocated in a line crew. We moved around quite a bit in the district I worked in. Where ever we were needed, we went to help build new plant mostly in the rural areas. Most of us had returned from the service in World War Two. The telephone expansion was geared up to build new lines in the rural communities, where customers had no kind of telephone service. We had to dig the pole holes, set the poles in the holes, climb the poles and hang the crossarms, string the wire and lay it over the crossarms and finally sag the wire,(that is to stretch the wire tight), and tie the wire to the insulators on the crossarm. You might say, well that sounds like hard work. You are right! But at that time it was the best job I thought a person could have.
I worked in a line crew six years. It was during this time I met the queen of my heart. After two and a half years of courtship, I asked my queen to marry me and she consented to do so. We loved each other very much and that marriage has lasted over forty five years now, and it keeps getting sweeter as the days go by. We had three great children during that time, a son and two daughters. The main thing that keeps us going now are two grandsons who are all boy. Well it keeps getting better.
The next job I had with the telephone company, was as an installer-repairman. I thought, how much better can it get? Now I can work alone and I have my own vehicle, a pick-up with a service body.
That's me in the truck on a cold snowy day.
The next job was in the central office switchroom. Employees there are called switchmen. My responsibility involved the maintenance of the central office equipment. That equipment was the switching mechanism that tied two customers together. It was a very important job, and much responsibility, to make sure there was ample equipment working to take care of the load of calls that were going through the office at any given time. I thought I had reached the height of my capability when I got that job as switchman. However, my boss was promoted to a larger town, and beyond all my expections, I was promoted into his job. Do you mean that I am qualified to take over the responsibility of a manager of the forces that I worked alongside of yesterday? I was assured by my new boss now, who was the District Plant Manager, that he had all the confidence that I would do a good job in the new position I was undertaking. I worked hard at that job, but it too was a rewarding job. In a little over two years, our customer trouble report rate had dropped over sixty five percent. Here again is where the work itself was the rewarding factor, to know that you had a part in that big reduction in customer trouble reports. Service was improving. Customers are more satisfied. How can it get any better?
From there I moved into four other management jobs, and it just kept getting better and better with each move. There is a point here I would like to pass along to you who may just be starting out in a new work. It applies to every condition you are faced with each day. Take what is offered to you in this life, and apply yourself to the task, and do the very best you can toward accomplishing that task, even through sacrifices on your part, and my friend you will be surprisingly rewarded.
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