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I've worked on the management side of 3 strikes while I worked at PacBell.

I also used to worked for Pac Bell.

The union strike fund barely offers a crappy bag of groceries to the striking employees. If a union member dares to cross the the line, they can be fined all the money they earn and more.

That's why although union dues were deducted from my check, I wasn't a member of CWA.

The union members ALWAYS lose.

True, but I always saved up some money and considered a strike to be an unpaid vacation, so I enjoyed myself.

In the central offices, the wire chiefs take care of fixing stuff that their incompetent subordinates can not or will not fix.

I worked on the frame and we always returned to a big ol' mess.

What area did you work in, Myrddin? I worked in a central office in the harbor area of L.A.

I started in Toll COE at 525 B St in San Diego. When the Trade St data center opened, I moved to the PREMIS/LAC site support staff. When that was complete, I moved to the SOAC/LFACS implementation tasks. Upon completion of that task, I took on the COSMOS hardware replacement. My last major project was the Quick Service system that permits customers to call an IVR and change Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, 3-way calling and Speed Call-8 without dealing with a service rep....in English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese too. I helped the CSFT development staff by building a software equivalent of the special multi-drop modems used for the SORD printers. The hardware devices used on the physical printers were too slow to put on the CCI supermini computers. I set up 4 serial ports running a protocol machine that handled the addressed multicast protocol. That allowed the supermini to suck up 4X the bandwidth from SORD and write electronic versions of the SORD orders on a hard disk file instead of overrunning the internal hardware buffer of the serial converters.

My first strike duty was a directory assistance office. Yuck. 18 paper directories. Drunk perverts calling to find a bar or a cathouse.

The second strike found me at Trade St. 12 hour shifts and free food.

The last strike I worked was more "hands on". I had security duty for all the central offices in the Imperial Valley. Holtville, El Centro, Calexico, Imperial, Brawley, Calipatria and Niland. I had to call the control office on entering each building. Most of my "work" in the office was running to the stock room to swap defective cards from the 5ESS or remotes. I had two bad experiences in Calipatria. The worst one was getting hit with pesticide by a passing agricultural aircraft. My ability to breath properly was hindered for almost 4 hours as I sat on the floor inside the Calipatria CO. The second unpleasant experience in Calipatria was having a solid blanket of cockroaches streaming over the ground as I was using the payphone on the side of a convenience store. They ran over the top of my shoes. Yuck.

I didn't leave any messes behind for the union staff. Half the union staff in the Imperial Valley returned to find their old step offices had been converted to 5E remotes during the strike. The guy who was commuting DAILY from El Cajon to El Centro was one of the parties relieved of that task.