Spent the first 8 yrs of my working life as a GPO engineer. 3 yrs of training in those days. I'm told that's down to 6 mths (but I stand to be corrected). Hated cleaning the Strowger switches (took about an hour for each one). Last few yrs in a repeater Station were much more straightforward.

graham.

that 'one small dirty contact' was probably because I was getting bored!

Having had some serious problems with my internet connection and later with the telephone itself, I ended up with daily communications with my service provider (TT) and BT exchange and OpenReach engineers.

Apparently components and cables were replaced at the exchange, plus home and outside lines were checked, and 'possible/suspect' faults were corrected. At the end of the day, it was reported "there is a fault, but its a fault that's not easily identifiable. Let us know if you have further problems, and we will again monitor the system". Since then problems have been very few, but it makes me wonder, with monitoring and modern technology, why the actual faults could not be traced, and it ended up like a guessing exercise?.

Spuds> One of my colleagues used to be ex-BT.

Although we supplied a lot of equipment to BT we didn't have a thorough picture of how the network acually worked. (we didn't need to for day to day business)

One day we all decided a seminar would be a good idea and roped our colleague into giving it.

Fascinating the amount of problems from the exchange to the customer.

From the ingenuity of cable thieves (a problem throughout the years) and countermeasures against them.

To dog pee and green boxes.

One of the big problems in the Local Loop apparently is on old wiring and water. Electrolysis erodes the copper so it is only 'just' connected.

A customer can have a fault fixed, but several other circuits may then have problems as they are disturbed.

The ex-engineers will know better. I was on the Fibre Optic side of supply.