The prodigal apprentice had returned. My first thought when hearing that Ted was at the front entrance asking for me was, “seven years.” It had been seven years since Ted was allegedly involved in a car theft. The statute of limitations had expired.
Was it a coincidence that Ted had appeared the day after I was back working in Cambridge, for the first time in six years? Or had Ted been in contact with someone in the company? Those questions didn’t occur to me right away, but I did wonder why Ted was there. He was apparently alone, but that didn’t mean his intentions were good. I told the receptionist I’d be right down.
Ted was very pleased to see me. When I saw him smiling with his hand extended, I was pleased to see him, too. We shook hands and sat in the lobby to talk. I told Ted that I’d been working at other company offices for six years, and I’d just returned to Cambridge the previous day. From Ted’s reaction, it was obvious he had shown up when he did purely by chance, hoping I’d be there.
I told Ted about the police call, without asking him for details about what he and his cohort had done. Ted admitted he’d screwed up and made a big mistake. Knowing the police were looking for him, Ted had made his way to Haiti, and that was where he’d been for the past seven years. So what had Ted been doing, and why had he made a point of stopping by to see me?
Ted said he started a business in Haiti, specializing in data communications and computer networking. The business was doing well, thanks to everything I’d taught him about the technology and troubleshooting. Ted was there to see me simply because he wanted to say thank you. We shook hands again, wished each other good luck, and said our goodbyes.
I’ve thought about what happened with Ted many times over the years, and thanks to the “all’s well that ends well” finish, I decided to finally tell the story. The End!
On LinkedIn, I told some war stories about my old job. This is something I wrote about Ted’s replacement, who fortunately was already working for the company.
Part 7b: As an employee, I of course wanted customer technical problems to be fixed as quickly as possible. As a supervisor, if someone in my group looked good as a result of a job well done, that was all for the better…. until it wasn’t.
Terminal servers, in combination with Ethernet repeaters, brought a rapid decline to Statistical Time-Division Multiplexers and Data PBX’s. As we saw in my group, new PBX installations came to an abrupt halt, and TDM’s were used only for long-haul communication to ancillary facilities over leased phone lines. Ethernet repeaters were a surprisingly disruptive technology, and unlike everything that came after them, they were as simple as they were disruptive.
A transceiver that has a repeater connected to it must have the Heartbeat/SQE signal disabled, so the jumper at each end had to be pulled. That’s all there was to it, as I told a member of my group before he flew off for a system installation at a customer in Florida I’d assigned to him.
He’d been in my group for just over a year, after transferring from the in-house hardware group. Although he didn’t have any college under his belt, he was a young, eager go-getter who learned quickly.
Upon his return from the site visit, he submitted his resignation. He explained that when he arrived at the hospital, the fiber optic repeater link wasn’t working, just as I had told him to expect. The IT director was there with his technicians, along with a network contractor. They’d been struggling with the problem for a while, and everyone was stumped. When my guy arrived on the scene, he told them to remove the SQE jumpers from the transceivers. Problem solved.
The IT director was so impressed by this bit of magic that he pitched a job offer. It was for a lot more money, they’d pay his moving expenses, and they’d even help him find a place to live. Once he was settled, he could start taking college classes that they would cover. And, yes, they really did do all of that.
I didn’t consider something so minor as knowing how to set SQE in a transceiver as the basis for a job offer, but it had been for me, and so it also was for him. Being ten years younger than myself, and single, he accepted the offer. Much of what my group did involved helping customers with industry-standard technology, and staff turnover became a problem for me.