Fun_People Archive
3 Jan
The Central Office of the future

Date: Tue,  3 Jan 95 16:58:44 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: The Central Office of the future

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Wendell Craig Baker <wbaker@splat.baker.com>
From: arctos@arctos.com (The Arctos Group)

On Thu, 29 Dec 1994  "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@alter.net> wrote...
>
> ...or my favorite, the cause of most telco outages according to 
> Bellcore or people that study these sorts of things:
>
>	 "Human Intrusion Failure"
>
> It's got a nice ring to it :-)

At a symposium at MIT earlier this year, a representative of the
Communications Workers of America (CWA) began a presentation bemoaning
the loss of union craft jobs among telcos by drawing on the chalkboard a
sketch representing the telco C.O. of the future:

       +--------------------------------------------------+
       |         ***                                      |
       |        (o o)                      +-----------+  |
       |          ~                        |  ( ) ( )  |  |
       |        /-+-\                      |           |  |
       |       /  |  \                     |           |  |
       |      o   |   o    @@\         /   |    (  )   |  |
       |         / \       ++ \=======/    |           |  |
       |        /   \         /\     /\    |           |  |
       |       /     \       /  \   /  \   |           |  |
       |      ==     ==     =    = =    =  +-----------+  |
       +--------------------------------------------------+

In this picture, there is a single man, a dog and a computer.  The man's
job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite the man if he touches
the computer.

© 1995 Peter Langston