AB6ZE

For over thirty years I resolved about twenty-five thousand calls.  In the seventies and eighties most problems occurred with the hardware; the employer provided a lot of training on their products and required in depth knowledge of the functioning of the hardware.  Many of the peripherals contained complex electro-mechanical parts that had to be replaced and realigned.  The disk drives were large, had many head crashes.  There were many different impact printers (drum, band, matrix, etc.) that needed frequent repairs.  The repairs were costly and time cosuming.   Then the PCs came.  The impact printers were replaced by laser printers.  Reliability, the quality of print greatly improved, more knowledge of the software was needed.  Often you had to “fix the customer” instead of the hardware.  By the end of the the millenium the technicians’ age was coming to an end.  The company provided less and less training, and the work was becoming like the assembly line.  Now it’s becoming more like a horse race and instead of pay raises you get pay cuts…

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It’s time for me to retire – April 30th 2008 was my last day at work…

I worked at an electronics company in quality control in Hungary until we left the country in 1971.

In Italy, in the refugee camp I did different types of work to supplement our needs,  in construction, tannery, garbage collection, tomato harvesting, vineyard work and even as an extra in movie production, whatever was available.

Shortly after we arrived in Cleveland, in 1972, I found work at an air conditioning shop for $2.00 per hour.  Soon I was offered a job for $2.50 at a lamp factory, where I worked for two and a half years, until the Teamsters Union was brought in.  The owner responded with a layoff just before Thanksgiving.  I found work three days later at Meriam Instruments for more money and went to school at night at Control Data Institute to learn Computer Technology.   After graduating there I got a job as a technician at Data Pathing Inc., a subsidiary of NCR in 1977.  Since then I had worked at several large corporations until I retired on May 1^st 2008.  I reached a top pay of $24.00 per hour.