From my comment on the FB group Bell Telephone
Pat Chicas
I worked for RSCCD, which owns the Sheriffs Training Center. Man, I would have loved to slap their hands! The OCSD installed their phone system on prem, and we supplied the data circuits, so our patch cords and theirs shared the same patch panels to the wall outlets. We would get a call from the users and find out that their techs had unplugged and/or moved our patch cables. We ordered a bunch of green patch cables and put a sign on them to keep away from the green ones, and that helped some.
Then I had to deal with the problem of having a few fax lines mixed in with their phone lines. One problem I had with our Xerox “WorkCentre” was the fax stopped working. I got dial tone at the RJ-11 plug at the machine, so their field tech came out and pulled up the error messages in that WorkCentre. He told me that the fax line “had the wrong polarity”!! Geez, what a prima donna! The last time I remember any telco line needed the correct polarity was back in the ’80s when the Touchtone pads wouldn’t work if it was wrong. I checked the crossconnects and the problem was upstream from the MPOE, so there was not my problem. It ended up that the pain in the butt WorkCentre was configured wrong. Just another day of finger pointing and wasted time.
While I was there I checked out the ‘museum’ displays, including the switchboard. I thought the (disarmed) bombs were cool. Since I had worked a switchboard in the army, much of what seeing that switchboard were just bad memories. Like the steam heating pipes for the whole army post ran through the switchboard room, so it was sweltering hot in the room. And we had a pump type fire extinguisher in the room. Someone flipped open the lid and relieved himself in it. After a few days the smell was overwhelming! Bad memories…
