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The phone technician
By Tina Griego
I've done just about any kind of work there's ever been. I worked in a day care center when I was a teen-ager. I bagged groceries for Safeway. I worked at what they call the Mouse House, in the research division. It was, you know, a real peon-type job. We fed and cleaned the mouse cages, and, you know, watched them go through the phases of cancer because they injected cancer and tried different treatments on them. And we killed them. I mean, if we had too many mice or we were done with the experiment, we had to put them in these vats of chloroform and kill them. I hated that. I've been at US West about 10 years. I'm an outside network technician, installing and repairing telephone lines. In my garage there's about eight women and about 60 men. It's really different, in some ways, working around so many men. You hear about women gossiping. Men are just as gossipy as women are. In fact, they may be a little bit harsher about it. The difference is they will say really bad things about you to your face if that's what they feel like doing. They don't have to wait and do it behind your back. I like working with the guys. I've got a lot of respect for them. They've been very willing to share information and help me when I didn't understand something. Some of them are very prone to be kind of rough. They'll make hints or suggestions, you know. "I'd like to take you out." But when you're 42 years old and a grandmother, you're not easily offended. It feels like a joke to me. But I worry a lot that I should hold up a different standard and not let them talk that way because of other women that may be offended. They may mean it with some other person, and I've led them to believe it's OK. But I do try to make sure they understand that there are lines that you can't cross. Every day the workload goes up, and every day you have customers who are angry when we get to them. You have to be able to deal with them, reassure them that things are going to be taken care of. You need to have fairly good listening skills when you're talking to the customers, and you need to have a lot of patience. Basically, the company wants us to do approximately one job every two hours. But I've reached a point where I'll call and I'll tell my boss, "You know, this customer has been without service for seven days, and I'm not willing to walk away without hearing a dial tone at their house." I really like working with the customers. Telephone service is really important to people, so I feel like I'm doing something that's worthwhile. I'd like to get more of a technical education because this isn't nearly as technical as I thought it would be. It's more physical than technical. I don't really know what I want out of my job. I think because I was a single parent who had to support my kids, working is more important to me than it should be. Now that I'm getting older, I'm thinking about what I want from work besides the income. I'd like to do something more technical, but am I going to be able to help people being a computer administrator or something? I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out.
July 25, 1999
Colorado Millennium 2000
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