I had Verizon come to the house to replace the FiOS backup battery unit and power supply. The battery was changed out about two months ago and the unit was already beeping a false positive warning for me to replace it again.

While Kevin was here doing his work, I struck up conversations about my years as an IXC/CLEC Central Office technician, Verizon & FiOS.

After he was done and bringing his tools back out to his truck (Chevy Silverado), I pointed to the pole that had the two flapping drops that a prior tech had failed to properly cut and asked if he would go up and cut them down. Kevin said no problem, took a ladder down from the truck, propped it up, grabbed a harness and climbed up the pole and took them down. I asked if I could keep the cables (including the cut aluminum "clamps" that were used to attach the cables to the pole.

Kevin did mention that Bell used copper clamps at one time as opposed to the aluminum of today (something that I was not aware of).

I brought the pieces inside and cleaned up the shortest of the all. The jackets are filthy to say the least. I even used Brasso to clean the exposed copper conductors. I'm sure that the cable was manufactured by Western Electric despite the lack of lettering on the jacket.

I gotta tip my hat to the OPS technicians who worked with these cables. I snapped three pictures of the piece in question...

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