While growing up in
the Fifties, I was inspired by a visit to the
American Museum of Natural History, where I
discovered dinosaur fossils arranged as if they were
alive. Monsters from the past towered over this small
boy. How well I remember the Brontosaurus being run
down by a pack of Allosauruses, their motion frozen
in a three-dimensional x-ray one could walk around. I
was awestruck and inspired. The Brontosaurus has had
a name change since my childhood, Apatosaurus. The
hall was closed during my last visit to the museum
and I don't know if those stone skeletons have been
newly arranged. They had rearranged the stony bones
of Tyrannosaurus rex. When I was a kid, its skeleton
stood upright and it was dragging its tail. A new
understanding has evolved and the museum altered that
original 1915 mounting to show Rex as a sleek, racing
beast.
Once I was well versed in a dozen hard scientific
names for these "terrible lizards", but my
attention has wandered during forty years of exciting
discoveries and further research in the field. There
are new small boys memorizing the new names.
In the Fifties is also when Random House began
publishing their "allabout books". The very
first book in that series was Roy Chapman Andrews' All
About Dinosaurs. Roy Chapman Andrews was
explorer extraordinaire and leader of the Central
Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s. His account of the
Gobi Desert and the finding of the first dinosaur
eggs filled me and a thousand other kids with envy
and a taste for adventure. What I didn't know at the
time was Andrews' difficult dealings with the
warlords and bureaucrats of a disintegrating China,
and the truculent and paranoid Soviet communist who
began to subjugate Mongolia. I wonder how he would
have dealt with my customer.
It is a typical night that finds me working the
graveyard shift in one of the many offices of
AT&T, watching over some of the industry's
telecommunication networks. The telephone rings for
the umpteenth time. I hit the talk button and through
my headset greet whoever is on the other end of the
line. It is an irate customer demanding an E.T.R.,
which stands for Estimated Time of Repair. We have an
obligation to try and give the customer an estimated
time of repair because upper management has made this
commitment on behalf of all of us, yet it is a trick
that requires some telepathy.
In this particular case the trouble has been isolated
to Southwestern Bell's portion of the circuit. Since
it is some hour between midnight and dawn, most of
the telecommunication industry is limping along on a
skeleton crew. It will take an indeterminate amount
of time to reach the appropriate person in
Southwestern Bell who handles call-outs. How does one
predict the length of time it will take that
dispatcher at Southwestern Bell to locate an
available technician? Is it possible to anticipate
how far down the list the dispatcher will have to go,
trying to reach by telephone each name in turn before
they reach the one who is available? Here is where
telepathy would pay off, since by knowing beforehand
which technician on the list will be available, the
dispatcher can call that technician first.
Southwestern Bell needs to hire more psychics. A
psychic will know where a technician is. A psychic
will know whether that technician is already on the
road to another trouble or is at work in the
telephone closet on the thirtieth floor of a
different customer's conglomerate headquarters. In
one intuitive flash it will come to a soothsayer
exactly how long it will take that technician to
finish their present job, jump into their van, and
journey to that exact unmanned central office among
the many from where the problem can be resolved.
"Don't take such-and-such a route because there
will be a jackknifed truck blocking three lanes in
another twenty minutes," the dispatcher will
advise their technician. Alas, Southwestern Bell has
clearly missed the boat and failed to hire any
telepathist to be dispatchers. When I call them for
an E.T.R., they tell me they haven't yet been able to
find an available technician.
There is a stream of hot words entering my left ear
from my customer who tells me that is not good
enough. I close my eyes and call upon my talent that
helps me write fiction. I try to visualize a
realistic story. It's not just finding a technician,
and imagining the technician's length of travel in a
part of the country I've never been, but I must also
imagine the technician's search for the right
documentation, then their explorations of the central
office for the right floor, frame, and shelf. Nor
does it end there. An estimated time of repair
requires knowing the technician's level of skill and
just how long the trial and error attempts at repair
will take. Then if equipment needs to be replaced,
how long will be the search for the new piece? I must
also take into account if this trouble is
intermittent. Any estimated time of repair includes
waiting for the trouble to make its appearance.
Adding the sums, inventing difficult moments and
lucky breaks, and taking into account just how many
times the customer will call demanding escalations, I
throw all these calculations into a pot and stir. But
escalations are particularly difficult.
Escalations require dropping the ongoing repair work
to take the time to contact the appropriate level
manager and then discuss the matter with them. It can
take a long time to reach a manager who is dead
asleep and who left their pager in the briefcase on
the coffee table in the living room downstairs.
My irate customer wants me to force order on to the
unpredictable universe in order to lull them with a
sense of security. My customer needs to believe I am
an omnipotent being. If however the technician en
route gets a flat, if the faulty equipment refuses to
cooperate when the technician arrives by running
perfectly thus disguising any trouble, if a
replacement for a broken piece of equipment is not
immediately at hand, the customer does not think it
is the universe that is out of kilter, but me
personally. I'm the one the customer has trapped on
the telephone. Having failed to control and predict
destiny, the customer will either commend me to the
devil or condemn me to my upper management.
So I tell the customer "three and a half to four
hours". This is not prophecy, but how long I
feel I can reasonably put the customer off. The
customer will then call again, but who knows, maybe
by that time the trouble might be fixed. Meanwhile, I
will be able to get some work done, perhaps even on
their problem.
I should have stayed with my decision at ten years of
age to become a paleontologist.
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