I had the usual jobs as a kid, cutting grass etc., etc.
High school summer jobs I worked as construction labor.
Went to college & did several things during that time… all at night. Worked as a janitor for a couple years, a Bakery, Goodyear tire & Rubber.
Graduated & taught Jr. High School for 28 years.
During that time I did various different 2nd & summer jobs through those years.
Mechanic (mostly trucks & heavy equipment.), 18 Wheeler driver (tankers, flats, & boxes), labor building houses, remodeled a few places, sales (I sucked at that.), & managed a storage unit place my buddy owned.
About 10 years before retiring from teaching in 2005 I became a USCG Licensed Master & started running boats for pay in the summers. Then did that full time after I retired from teaching.
Slowed down about 4 years ago & just run boats occasionally now.
In other words… a Jack of many trades, but master of only a few.
Sometimes lived the dream… a few times the nightmare.
IT Systems Engineer for a large US ISP/Telecom. I manage provisioning automation systems that setup and teardown voice/data/video services for subscribers nationwide on a variety of hardware as well as wearing the Business Analyst hat assisting with projects and plumbing the depths of the database. Prior I managed provisioning fallout, supported installation, and for a brief stretch did helpdesk for customers.
I’ve been doing this work for 17 years now. I miss my prior career in manufacturing where I did mechanical/electrical design.
The work is stable, the pay is reasonable, but telecom is not an industry I’d recommend presently - slow growth, byzantine processes, and the increasing liabilities of legacy copper networks.
I can only imagine what Damage 440v can cause — I had a Miter Saw setup on a damp floor and cut the cord —somehow the ground fault never tripped —all I remember is seeing like sparks behind my eyes and there was chicken scratch marks in the saw dust on the floor where I was trying to get away from the saw — My helper said it was only a duration of a few seconds —Felt longer than that to me :person_facepalming:
I spent 5 years as a chemist until Clinton and the “Peace Dividends” put the company I worked for under with all the cancelled military contracts. Last 27 years as a Deputy sheriff but I’m retiring this week. No idea what the future really holds.
I work with major wire-line carriers often, their silo’ed operations make them so hard to deal with. My interaction with them mostly is on the data side of the house with metro and sw-wan transports. I do still have ties into the TDM world. Yes, the giants are starting to feel the pain of ancient copper plants and dwindling service use and infrastructure repairs costs going so high.
Chops, it was a bad combination of an inexperienced rural lineman, a mistake on my part and days of driving nearly freezing rain. Oddly enough the 30 foot fall is what saved my life. Second degree burns on my hands and knees and weeks of pain to follow. I would never work in that dangerous industry again. Metal grain bins, everything is a conductor, everything is always urgent, everything fails in the worst weather and high voltage is brutal when a combination of mistakes are made.
It isn’t any prettier from the inside looking out. So many disparate legacy networks and legacy backend systems held together with gaffer’s tape and bailing wire.
Barring improbable positive changes in the market my group had to tell the business no more new voice products - haven’t made a profit on voice since before I started with the company and the federal incentives are disappearing.
Good news is that the fiber networks are humming along. Bad news is that some ~20 years after the first large-scale fiber-to-the-prem rollouts they’re still costly to deploy.
Complete polar opposites. I worked in a lab knowing what my monthly retinue would be. Deputy, I was lucky to know what was for lunch. Problem solving skill set as a chemist does help in the field. I enjoyed both, more job satisfaction from being a Deputy.
The last time I was friends with a provisioner, he told me that the provisioning front end took all of the commands in and parsed them and re-wrote them to a TL1 gateway and then converted it back to native configs and sent them out. Only because the backup system was very old and only understood TL1. I have not thought TL1 since the very early 90’s on a slik96!
TL1 is still the automation interface for a number of platforms . It’s old and fiddly, but easier to glance over than XML. CLI is generally easier still, but I only see it with GWRs.
I’m 65 now.
I started at the age of 17 working, for an outside company, within a particular military facility with duties of supervising all of their mechanical and electrical writing systems. After a few years I had other assignments as well, but what I was doing in there, stayed in there.
I always remained a civilian, never wore a uniform, when I performed duties I had an equated military rank. Then I argued strongly with a colonel about a matter; in a military environment: colonel trumps civilian, and I resigned. I did other tasks in adjacent areas for a while and then dropped out for good. I then worked in the security IT industry at several firms.
In 1986 I was in Berlin helping in the protests and demonstrations for the presence of the “Wall”, in the West and in the East (in the East with much difficulty).
In December 1989 I was in Romania, in Bucharest, just after the revolution to bring instruments to two hospitals in the capital and also for other reasons.
In 1991/1992 (winter only) I took part in the Yugoslav War as a driver, photographer and risk assessment to supply refugee camps in Slovenia and Croatia; At that time, in Zagreb, I met my wife, who is German-speaking, and we got married in the capital of a South-East Asian country.
I have three children, I have continued to work in different jobs but the state does not willingly offer people like me a pension. In Rome, where I live, I have two apartments, I am renovating them and I think I will rent one, but I don’t know my future.
