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From: asuvax!mothra!bakerj@ncar.ucar.edu (Jon Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Phreaks of the Monolithic Era of Telephony
Message-ID: <12329@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 18 Sep 90 22:23:27 GMT
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> [Moderator's Note: The fact that some employees of AT&T in the past
> acted like jerks is not a sufficient reason to have broken them up,
> that's for sure.  PAT]

Sure it is.  Such behavior is the lowest-level manifestation of what
'the company' had become.  Directly or indirectly, this activity was
representative of the company's attitude and philosophy - the overall
AT&T gestalt, if you will.


[Moderator's Note: Then we disagree on the extent of the 'jerk-ism',
and its prevalence in the old Bell System. My experience was that the
fools there were only a very small percentage of the total work force.
Most of the people were hard workers, dedicated to the welfare of the
customers. As my former neighbor here in Rogers Park, Charlie Brown,
former Chairman of AT&T, once said, (speaking of MCI) "When's the last
time *they* had a couple of their men working working in the mountains
of Montana in January accidentally fall off a cliff and kill
themselves in the line of duty while trying to restore phone service
to a community which had lost all its links in a severe storm the day
before?"  And *that* to me is what the old Bell System was about:
people who cared, and got the job done right.  PAT]