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Were a lot of telephone installers thieves?

Started by JimH, June 04, 2011, 10:49:16 AM

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JimH

I don't know if this has ever been addressed here, but every time I see "from the estate of a telephone installer", etc., I have to wonder....was all this stuff stolen????  It seems like (lucky for us) a lot of these guys kept stuff from work.  I know Ma Bell was fanatical about inventory and can't believe this much slipped through the cracks.  I see auctions all the time where the seller says "Dad (or Grandpa) worked for the phone company, etc".  I just remember as a kid in 1975 when my grandma's 302 finally stopped working, she begged the telephone man to let her keep it.  He said "we have to have one going back for every one we install".  I wonder how true this was.
Jim H.

Adam

Even though a lot of phone company property ended up in their hands, I don't think most of those phone company personnel would have considered themselves thieves.  They were simply a kind of elite, a group of people that had control over a class of devices most people did not have access to.  Because they were elite, they considered themselves to have certain privileges.

For example, when I was in high school, I "social engineered" a telephone installer I saw at his truck on the street into giving me a 2500 set, telling him I needed it for a school project.  He just gave it to me, no questions asked.  Because he could.
Adam Forrest
Los Angeles Telephone - A proud part of the global C*Net System
C*Net 1-383-4820

Dave F

As has been noted elsewhere on the Forum in the past, many phones that have ended up in the public domain have done so not due to theft, but rather due to the poor design of the phone trucks along with the driving habits of the installers.  For some strange inexplicable reason, the rear doors of many phone trucks apparently had a costly habit of swinging open at odd times, particularly when passing the residences of known collectors.  People would go outside, find a phone on the lawn or driveway, and know that one of those "defective" trucks must have recently zoomed by.  Such a Eureka moment happened to one of my friends in about 1968.  He had always wanted a payphone to play with, but none of the installers would give or sell one to him.  After all, those were Phone Company property and had to be strictly accounted for.  One day, he heard a screeching of tires and went out front to investigate.  Lo and behold, he saw a green Pac Tel truck flying around the corner in a cloud of blue-gray smoke, the left side tires clearly off the ground and the rear doors flailing wildly from side to side.  Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, as he turned to go back inside he discovered that a 233G (3-slot payphone) had somehow flown out of the truck and miraculously landed intact not 10 feet from his front door.  Even more amazing was the fact that a 685 subset also landed a few feet away from the phone.  When he told me what had happened I was a bit skeptical.  After all, what are the chances that exactly the phone he was looking for would......  Anyway, he assured me that the story was 100% true, and I am telling it to you just the way it was told to me.  My friend is no longer with us but his 233G has survived, and it now occupies an honored place in my phone collection.  So, when you consider the way it was in the old days, you can generally dismiss the idea of theft.   Just give thanks for those rickety old trucks.

Shovelhead


deedubya3800

This type of thing still happens. Recently, an installer for our local phone company just "gave" my grandmother-in-law a 2500 from his truck because she was having problems with her own phone and he told her just not to tell anyone.

It's a Cortelco make from 2005, and what's most interesting about it is the "PQRS" on the 7 key and the "WXYZ" on the 9 key. So 21st century! But aside from that, it's virtually identical to the old WE 2500s from the outside, especially on the bottom, but only half the weight. Still though, it appears to be one of the best-built phones of late.

K1WI

   I've read this thread with great interest. As a reitired ,after just under 35 years , I found the observations easy to misinterpret.   One hallmark of the old "bell sytem was the concept of safety , quality , and honesty in every step of the job.  The safety was a  given but always  a work in progress , the quality was always was always a major focus  and the hones tjust was what we were and what we did . were we perfect , by no means no , but that vast majority of phone employees always tried to do their best.
  I can site  literaly hundreds of cases where workers just did the right thing. One that comes to mind , back in the old days a coworker dropped his wallet at a very remote location , in it was over $1000  to be used towards a new home, at that time most phone guys were makig less than a $100 a week so this was BIG money. Well ..a worker from another department , that did not know him , found the wallet and to make the story short drove 75 miles to get it to him. He could have just walked away and "finders keepers"
    To the subject of wht could be iconsidered "lifting" company property , many cases were accepted as normal policy , caused by oudated products , good customer relations  (making the customer happy }. and just a better use of old "stuff".  I honestly never saw much out and out theft , most of the t
ime just unservicable materials and equipment , and with their boses approval.

deedubya3800

Well that answers a question I had in another thread. I always wondered about the many ways that Bell System property ended up in private hands. I knew for sure not that many people bought their phone in the '80s. I wish an installer would hand me some outdated station equipment.

AE_Collector

#7
I concur with K1WI. I have lots of phones acquired while at work but in almost all cases the phones that followed me home were phones that were too old to have even been considered for a trip to our rehab line to be repaired and redeployed. There were phones that I would like to have added to my collection but to me it would have been theft to take a phone that was still servicable but it was just the opposite of theft to give a new home to a phone that was going to be scrapped otherwise.

AE Stylelines were always a phone that I would like to have had examples of every color but they were the newest phone out there in the 1980's so I only had one of them that I can recall, A Candy Apple Red one. I passed on many chances to pick up good examples because we were still Rehabing them and sending them out again.

Fast forward to around 2005 or so and I realized that I still only had 2 or 3 Stylelines and they were now rarely seen in the field. Further more they were a bit of a fragile phone available in lots of colors that liked to discolor. I woke up and realized that if I still wanted one of every color I had better get to work at it.

I now have hundreds of them and am down to just a couple more colors needed for my collection. One day there is going to be a "BIG STYLELINE SALE" to reduce the number of duplicates that I have.

Terry

JorgeAmely

Jorge

AE_Collector

Styleline Pictures? I think I may have posted this picture on here somewhere before. I need to take an updated picture as I have several additional colors now.

Terry

K1WI

  I have to say the biggest "treasure trove" of  my collectable phones was obtained when I was an employee. I spent most of my career working inside on CO switches , but occasionaly took a temp assignment for out side work when it was available. In the late 1960s I lucked into a great summertime temp. job , in a very wealthy rural town collecting what was reffered to as "left in stations" that is phones left when people moved. Also that year the community I was asigned to was eliminating multi party  lines in favor of just two parties. I was instructed to box all newer plastic phones I got for refurbishing and all the older metal junk would go into the dumpster. I asked my foreman what would happen to the dumped ones and he told me they would just go to the land fill. He knew what I was getting at and beat me to the punch , he said to take any of the 'klunkers" I wanted out of the dumpster and in turn make a donation for what I thought was the scrap value of the metal in the poor box at church on sunday . Well for all that I took out of the trash that summer the poor box never did so well!
  I look back at the phones I "pulled" out and I'm still amazed , this town was one of the wealthiest in the country , and many are far from ordinary if not custom made by "Ma Bell"
     Andy    K1WI