I went to work for the phone company in July of 1969, 18 years old, fresh out of high school. I hired on as a mail clerk, the lowest paid employee along with operators but proved to be such a pain in the butt to my boss that when I asked to transfer to customer services, she was glad to sign the form after only 6 months in the position. I ended up being a customer representative at 18, an extremely early age according to the lady who trained me. The pay was slightly higher than clerk. In 1977, a federal law was changed that opened the jobs that had been classified as "men's" jobs to women and I was one of the first to transfer into the central office. I learned to repair and maintain the equipment that gave our customers dial tone and connected their calls to the people they wanted to reach, most of the time. It was the top paying job classification in a union shop, with the protections and benefits of working for a big company. It was a good job and I stayed in that classification until I retired in 2009, 40 years after I hired on. This is a type of the equipment I worked on. It is called a two motion switch and was quite ingenious.
Come below and see a very cool training manual written in 1954 but used when I was first trained, although in an updated version.
This manual is everything you ever wanted to know about how your phone worked in 1977.
http://wedophones.com/...
It was not to last much longer though. Electronic equipment came fast and upgrades were furious. We would get one new digital system installed and bebugged and bam! there was a newer one on the loading bay. But in its heyday, this equipment rocked, literally. It was full of huge electro magnetic relays that moved and all that combined rocked the building. It was fun while it lasted and then I went onto work on the digital and microwave systems. I have no idea what is in those buildings now. I retired in 2009 and never looked back. Time marches on.
This stuff is still in use around the world. I suppose I could get a job in Brazil or Argentina but I am too old to lift these huge heavy metal switches. Thank the FSM for a good job, an earned and rewarded pension and Social Security.