Never a dull moment. I gave myself pains controlling my laughter, but I would never be able to handle work in the field. Crazy people, whose very lives are dependent on a working telephone. I wonder what they did a hundred years ago when somebody in New York died? Panic? This lady in particular need the phone “worse than ever cause there’s been 4 deaths in the family since January”. It takes something I’ve never had to tolerate that kind of [people], by crackey.
I was with a new guy, Adrian. A real straight-laced company fly-by-wire, that one. But, he’s a near perfect employee. Some of the calls we did today—a paranoid sub [subscriber] who made him show his ID thru the mail slot(that was still unusual in 1981), [another] place so filthy your feet stuck to the floor, and a firehall full of yahoos. What a life those guys must lead. All day answering blazing false alarms. They ran the 25’ phone cord down the hall to the sleeping quarters until it got snagged in the floor polisher. No, I never slid down the pole. But I was tempted.
Rof R is in a rush to return, that wimpy broad he’s been hosing is gonna show [up at his apartment back east], and true to form, he’s giving himself 96 hours leeway to “rest-up”. We had the traditional a Saigon & he will leave early tomorrow to make it a two day trip. He’ll “forget” to take the books.
[Author’s note 2017: if I still had those books today, they’d be priceless as a revelation of what costs and business was really like in the 1980s for a couple of recent graduates. The version you get from the media is bogus.
[Author’s note 2023: sigh, a melancholy look from 43 years in the future back to this date. Here's a picture of Ronald Reagan to liven this page up. He was the last President that, it turns out, was honestly elected and it was his popularity as an actor. But he did too many things to upset the status quo and they've never allowed a fair election since.
