British Telecom
Posted October 9, 2010 by fred in Uncategorized. Leave a Comment
I spent a major part of my working life with British Telecom. I was stationed at Churchill Square Brighton until my retirement. I enjoyed work and it never became bored. In fact there was never the opportunity to become bored. It was normal practice to change jobs at roughly three-year intervals. One was usually thrown in at that deep end and rarely spent more than a week with the person who had previously done the job.
The office in Churchill square was a regional office responsible for six area offices. As a result the jobs that you were asked to undertake usually involved either administration or advisory work. It gave one the opportunity to travel to either area offices or telephone exchanges.
The office was situated above the shops in Churchill Square. The Southern Regional Headquarters had six District Office Offices throughout the South and a large Computer Centre at Portsmouth responsible for producing and despatch of the telephone bills. The District Office dealt directly with the public in respect of billing queries. My job was to deal with any problems which the district office could not solve. I enjyed visiting ther offices and the Computer Centre for this purpose. This was 1960 and computers were large and housed in a large complex. The BT one was named Leo. It had been developed for the distribution of Lyons Tea! It recorded customers telepone use and printed the bills. It also printed this information on large paper sheets which were despatched to the appropriate District Office.
It may seem strange to one used to a commercial environment, but within the Civil Service it was quite normal for executive staff to undertake work which would normally be regarded as in the sphere of the professional. I was therefore not surprised, for instance, to lead a team of auditors, investigating the work of the computer billing staff in the area offices or to design and plan the building of nuclear fall-out shelters beneath the telephone exchanges.
Throughout Britain there existed fallout shelters of one kind or another. The larger telephone exchanges had a shelter housing manual switching equipment. In more modern kinds the digital equipment would be disabled by the electro magnetic pulse generated by the nuclear explosion. Similarly government and other authorities needed their own shelters. Each of these required all the necessary facilities to maintain communications for a considerable time. The old kind of switchboards installed there in these shelters. My task, over a period of the years, was to design fallout shelters in the larger exchanges throughout the southeast of England. It was often possible to use space available in the cable chambers. It was a task which required imagination to forsee the requirements for a group of people to stay underground for some considerable time. People needed to eat, sleep, breath and to use a toilet. They needed air to breathe and warmth and be able to man a switchboard. Air needs filtering, water and food storage. Food must be stored and replaced regularly. The occupants will be frightened and confused. So, in addition to providing walls and roofs sufficient to give protection from radiation, all the other needs must be provided. At the same time be aware that public sanitation and water supply may be cut off. At the time, when I took over the duty, preparations consisted of hasty erection of interlocking bricks around and above switchboards at the time of a alert, in the switchrooms above ground . It became obvious to me that this would not provide the communications required by the Civil Authorities. I therefore designed underground switchrooms like the one below. Also bedrooms and dining rooms etc.
See also:
Estate management and transport fleet administration also fell to my lot.
]
Thus it was a that, at the time of my retirement, I held the title of Computer Systems Manager. Before being asked to undertake this job I had bought and used Sinclair computers. My earlier experience as regional computer billing liaison officer provided a little knowledge of the very large computers (mainframes) but this job involved working with a smaller one referred to as a mini. One which occupied an area two meters square. It provided a database serving dumb terminals situated in offices throughout the South East.
After retirement, I decided to purchase a PC and take a 10 day course. Looking back over this period it is an interesting fact that the PC to which I am dictating now, has more memory available than either the mainframe or the mini. Also that storing data at a remote location is what the net is moving toward today (the cloud). Long before the internet existed, this was our “net”. I took over a dial up system which I regarded as much too slow so I had our Engineers install a “private wire” which was more like todays internet.
In conclusion
I have written about various stages of my life and my blog fredsmemory. Looking back at all the various things that I was told to do without education or experience I have come to the conclusion that there must be certain amount of disbelief. For instance that I and another at the age of 16 left on our own on overnight duties at the police headquarters to answer the phones and take the necessary action. After all my education ended at the age of 14!
And then to join the army and of after five weeks, selected for a commission. When the time came when I had to decide whether to take up this option I decided to continue as a weapon training instructor. And then to be to take over control of an officers’ mess without any knowledge and without instruction.
At the end of my war service I could have opted to return to police duties and found a job in the civil service in agriculture. My experiences in that job were varied and again little or no instruction. Similarly after only one week accompanying a colleague in the national assistance board I was determining and authorising payment to applicants. I then joined the land commission where I and all my colleagues had no previous experience and we ea
I decided to build a house without using the services of a builder which meant drawing plans and employing carpenters, bricklayers etc. Again without any previous knowledge. The word they use today is project manager. I have seen many television programmes where people being project manager falling into many pitfalls. I do not recall problems myself.
Fred's Memories 