About Camden telephone engineer…!
About? Where do you start?
What was I doing and how did I get to here?
Working at BT since the mid 90’s – I thought I was in an “OK” type of job.
Not thinking too much about the future. Wrong move!
BT wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
I soon realised they was not interested in me, or anyone else for that matter.
You were a number – an EIN, an employee identification number.
That’s all you were about.
Your skills were not taken as an asset, you was not thought of as an asset – You were a number.
The whole company ran on a “tick the box” mentality.
People were not interested in what you were capable of,
could they tick a box on your number identification and get green statistics.
That’s how it felt on a daily basis
That’s how it was on a daily basis
Fair enough, “About” time to move on
The day I took my redundancy and left the monster minefield that is BT was a great day for me.
No more stress, no more people that didn’t have a clue as to what I did, managing me.
Could you work with the big brother scenario breathing down your neck, being monitored by people that knew how to tick boxes.
Telling you about statistics that were so irrelevant to you, that it felt more like an intimidation exercise.
Being scrutinised by someone that knew how to manipulate the stats, yet did not know how to achieve the stats.
Being fed stats by individuals that did not know what you had to do to earn a living.
The statistics would show you were not performing to your best abilities.
A car would smash a pole down and as you worked on that pole in the last 30 days, you would show as a failure.
Not the drink driver being shown as a failure. No,, the stats were there to show you was at fault.
You couldn’t delete human influence from the statistics, someone had to be blamed for a failure.
Go on site and you couldn’t complete your task because of a back room problem in one of the billing departments.
As an engineer you have no control of the BT system in place, someone has to be blamed…
You couldn’t finish the job, your stats would now reflect that.
Another dept let you down, yet there would be a record that – YOU couldn’t finish the job..!
The engineering jobs would send you to areas where even the police have to go in pairs.
If you would call for an assist, to feel a little safer, you was frowned upon by those that didn’t have to go there.
Apparently safety didnt cover dangerous areas, of which do exist.
If you was lucky enough to get a partner to assist you, their time was negative, unproductive time.
They were now seen as a failure, for not completing a task.
Everytime you tried to work as a team, you was soon knocked down as teams were individuals at BT
Training Courses, New Skills, A new Direction
Starting out on my own was not daunting, I have always believed in my abilities.
Going back to school and learning how to become a professional telephone specialist,
removing the stigma of being a BT employee.
I wont say “BT engineer” – When you go to school and learn about communications
you see how much BT kept you as a one trick pony, as their contracts do not require an engineer.
They need an employee that they’ve shown how to do a manual task.
You don’t need to think out the box, you don’t need to think for yourself.
BT have a process for any scenario you may come across,
mainly handing the work back to a control dept.
Now being a qualified WiFi specialist, Data engineer, fibre optic engineer
IT qualified and many more engineering qualifications I feel I have the right to say “Engineer”.