sundance-communications.com Forums Member Forums Phone Booth Your 1st Rookie Mistake....

Hope you all had a nice holiday...I enjoyed a couple of nice cuban cigars on the 3rd for my birthday....

I thought it would be entertaining and fun to hear about everybodies 1st rookie mistake...NO BLUSHING ALLOWED....

MINE WAS on the Tie UltraCom Phone system. Nobody told me the staions were fuse protected and I was tracing out some wires with my metal tipped probe....WELL I dont think I need to tell you what I did....I still hold the record for blowing about a dozen fuses in under 5 seconds.....

What was yours...

first big mistake was ripping out a 1A2 system we thought was only being used by the people who had bought a new system from us. turns out the whole building was using it.

Soon after going out on my own, I tried to remove a blown bulb on the console of a ITT TD-100 (?). It blew a fuse and several cards. Shut a whole courthouse down for several hours. Had to call in someone from another company.

Never touched that refrigerator-sized antique again.

I was trying to clean up a phone room and snipped of some old cables because I thought they were dead. Turns out they were ground start and I assumed they would be loop start. Took out a bank.

well not to rookish I guess. I used the old assume everything in the panel belongs to the phone system.

Was putting in a 1A2 system in the city jail. I was in the operations center and was toning out some cable pairs with a metal tip. (sound familiar?)

Well I was about halfway though the panel when all hell broke loose. alarms were going off like crazy. cops running all around. 5 floors up was a man down alarm going off. They looked around the floor with the camera and could not see the guard. everybody and their brother took off for the fifth floor running up the stairs.

(now I don't know about your area, but the cops around here are not in the best of shape if you know what I mean)

I stand there watching as the all run past the fifth floor guard station on camera. Then I hear it come over the radio. FALSE ALARM. The guard was off camera talking to an inmate.

I stood there wounding what the hell happened. chatted for a minute to the guards that were in the control center with me and went back to tracing.

Well guess what? MAN DOWN ALARM AGAIN!!

off they go running and it finally hit me. ooops! I shut the cabinet and left!!!

Installing a new switch in a bank and pulled the BAPA bridge clips on the 21x. Five minutes later a dozen cars from various law enforcement agencies had the bank surrounded. I don't touch BAPA's anymore!

This is great we had this chat at the Tech Talk convention in Las Vegas last year. I have 2 the same bank story where the cops came but even better I was working on Seimons 192/232 at Weber College. I had been in the phone business about a year but had never seen one of these. There were some stations dead on a station card so I was going to switch it out. Back then there was a toggle switch on the front of the card to take it out of service so I truned the card off so far so good. Pulled the card and put the spare I had in. Here where things went wrong. The plastic piece the holds the pins on the back plane apart also came off with the bad card so when the new card went in the system went bye bye. The power supply caught fire the whole switch was history. Now the best part. I call my boss and he ripped me a new one and loaded up another switch and these things were huge and the drove the 2 hours to the site where I got ripped somemore and sent home. I get to work the next day and the owner of the company is there loading up his truck with another 192 complete system and I was of corse ready for him to fire me on the spot but he just smiles and says Jack ( my boss) just did the same thing to the system he took out there that I did when he tried to install a station card.

Those old Siemens SD192 where very sensitive. I fried one my first time out in the Military, but it was a secure, mission crucial switch. After that I told everyone that I did not no anything about Siemens switches. Stuck to my two ROLM switchs and 1A2's.

I'm just waiting for my last one!
Bill

Many years ago I was hired on by my very good party-buddy who just started his own telecomm business. I was still in training and we had to move 2 KSU's for 2 companies who shared a suite and were moving together to a new one.
They had 1 Vodavi KSU and 1 Infinity KSU, or Infinite, or something like that. Like wise, the Phones said "Vodavi" and Infinity".

Well, we had to move them on a Friday night after hours, so my boss being my party buddy and workng late on a Friday night, well....we partied a bit while we worked....a toke here, a toot there, you get the picture.

So when we re-installed the systems, neither one came up. We spun for hours -literally- until about 11:30 pm. We had defaulted both systems, removed the covers and shorted out pins, everything we (he) could think of.

As we sat there completely stressed out, loaded, and out of ideas, I idly wondered what would happen if I plugged a phone into the other system.........and it came up!

The Vodavi phones went with the Infinite KSU and the Infinity phones went with the Vodavi KSU.

His jaw dropped so hard, I thought he was going to chip a tooth!

He said," What are we going to say?.....uh....uh...uh...They just came up! That's it, just play dumb!"

The customer bought it and even went so far as to say that area of L.A. was reputed to be on a poor power grid, known for brown outs.

"....Yeah, that's what it was...a brown out"

Needless to say he doesn't do phones anymore.

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Punch all Pairs!