Me? The Neotimer? Sixty five years old and still in demand? Still a Hoss who knows VOS? Wow!!
The Neotimer has always been intrigued by new and leading edge stuff, so he dove into the CDA like a beaver into a snake infested swamp. In very short order he had twenty four toll trunks connected and the CDA and was looking at them all for supervision, calling number, call"ed" number and call disposition, i.e., completed, busy, reorder, high and dry or no answer. It was great. The CDA ran a daily report of the problems it encountered and we were able to provide info to the Step by Step office that helped them to find some bad connectors. They thanked me profusely and I loved their gratitude. I was hooked. Not long after that Ms Helen and I and the whole rest of our growing family were in the Apple Store in Jackson financing an Apple II C with a printer and the whole works. This all led the Neotimer to embrace computers in his career any time he had the opportunity.
In 1985 the Neotimer and family moved to Middle Tennessee so he could take one of those aforementioned State Staff jobs. FCC Compliance we called it. The rules and regulations of Part 21 of the Communications Act of 1934 were so hard to figure out that a full time job in every state was the guy who went out to all the microwave stations and read the FCC Log entries, checked that the station was licensed and that all radio maintenance people who were making those log entries were licensed too. Better that I should find our discrepancies than someone from the Federal Government. But alas, microwave had rapidly begun to die off, being replaced by those infernal optical fiber carrier systems. The Neotimer figured, for the longevity of his career, he better grab hold of those fibers just as Tarzan did that next vine as he was swinging through the jungle.
And that's just what the Neotimer did. But.... "there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not" the Neotimer (Exodus 1:8 KJV with apologies). The Neotimer could see Radio and Lightwave staff support slipping from his hands even as the new pharaoh brought in his own favored people. The Neotimer jumped off the "maintaining of equipment" bandwagon to a slowly emerging process of analyzing alarm messages that equipment generated. These alarms could be sent to a remote location and correlated with other simultaneously occurring events. And that eventually lead to my learning VOS. Virtual Operating System, an OS from a little company called Stratus. It was enough like DOS to not be totally unfamiliar, it was unlike UNIX enough that the UNIX purists hated it, and, besides liking it for that reason, I also liked the fact that you could issue commands with real words or chose any word or acronym you wanted as an abbreviation to be that command. In the course of his time, the Neotimer did not become a VOS guru, but he held his own well enough to become a Senior Performance Engineer with a company whose software made VOS a household name among telephone companies' network organizations and he held a couple contract jobs after that for another four years or so. The Neotimer likes being retired, but he also likes the fact that he's still thought of when VOS is mentioned. (A VOS Hoss as it were.)
Oh, and The Mayor, well that is Jerry Lee Daily, one of the most talented and down to earth telephone men I ever had the privilege of working with. He was given that nickname by The Great Nicknamer, Elmo Rushing, (W4UBA). Richard Daily was mayor of Chicago when Jerry Lee transferred into our Toll Testboard group from Copperhill. "Daily?", Elmo asked. "Like the mayor, we'll just call you Mayor"? Mayor replied to Elmo, "Hoss you can call me anything you want to!"
