Mobile Phones

[bernard]

Hi

How did you more mature engineers manage without mobile phones for back up.Do you think there was a higher standard of engineer then.Or does modern refrigeration systems require a more versitle engineer your opinions please.

Regards bernard

[Mark]

Hi. bernard

Clients phones allways helped for calls to the base.

My first pager though was a nightmare.You had a sequence of speech to access your messages.

I remember my first call at 18 years old vividly.A Bulk milk tank high temperature and a distraught cowmen

Kind regards. Mark

[Snowman123]

The old days of a pager and finding a phone box, then having enough change in your pocket. It was better cause they could never tell if your pager went off at 5pm, when they would have jobs for you on the way home. Good old excuse was it never went off they could never prove it. Now with mobile phones it tells them when you've switched it off etc.

[rbartlett]

Back then it was very frustrating for both the engineer and the controllers. The not knowing used to cause a lot of headaches and when an emergency came in panic would ensue trying to locate engineers busy doing maintenances blowing out condensers with R22 or 502 ;-))

My second job was at comfort cooling -who were quite notorious around London back in the early/mid eighties- they got three phones for the service supervisors.

One guy was a bit of a talker (now european training director at carrier I believe)

His phone bill came in at £1500 for the MONTH !! (this was 1984!!)

We all had pagers back then and you darn't ignore it!!

When I started up a company in '87 we used pagers still as the mobiles calls were 50+ pence a minute for mobiles .

The final straw was getting paged fifteen times between 2 motor way junctions at Gloucester.

This meant whilst we were running round like headless chickens + driving off the motorway looking for a P.B calling in the handling company getting the numbers then ringing whom ever called.

ESp difficult to see the funny side when it's some guy trying to flog you a fax machine -which was all the rage back then..

Finally I managed to persuade my partner that we needed to commit £50-100 each PM to mobiles
(plus we had to get them plumbed in back then because of poor battery life)

Since then I have been paying Vodaphone approx £100 ever since

which is my small part in their swanky new HQ and paying schuey 20 million to circulate various tarmac's 18 time a year

cheers

richard

[Latte]

Hi Guys,

The company i work for has now issued all its engineers with O2 XDAII pocket pc's as phones and what can i say Fan ******* tastic. These had been issued so we no longer have to do manual jobsheets/timesheets and parts ordering done automaticly. Also loaded onto is is TomTom GPS nav system.

I have only had it one day and there is no way i could go back to my 3310. Don't know if anyone has tried to access the net on one yet but wht a tool.

Regards

Fatboy

[chemi-cool]

Hi Raymond,

Its only cause they can watch you now in better way

Can you download xxx movies while you work?

Chemi

[Brian_UK]

Hey Fatboy

We are supposed to be getting those beasties soon, I don't know about Tom Tom yet.

Word from some guys is that the phone side is a bit cr*p, not so easy to get at the phonebook and dial ??

I remember my old guvnor of years ago getting one of the first cellphones; boy didn't he look a prat carrying around a leather covered brick sized battery with a handset bolted ontop.

[Abe]

The company i work for has now issued all its engineers with O2 XDAII pocket pc's as phones and what can i say Fan ******* tastic. These had been issued so we no longer have to do manual jobsheets/timesheets and parts ordering done automaticly. Also loaded onto is is TomTom GPS nav system.

Fatboy

Fatboy, O2 XDA11 pocket pc.
Would you mind telling us a bit more about this piece of kit??
Im intrigued.........and facinated.

Abe

[Latte]

Hi Abe.
If you are more technically minded about phones than i am check out www.02.co.uk/xda.

Basically, its a palmtop loaded with windows mobile and all the usual stuff on it but then you load the companys software as well as other program's.
We had siclops ppc which allows us to fill out timesheets, view previous timesheets, jobsheets. basically everything we do now on paper works on this. the office do not need to phone with jobs and just send them to this unit and automaticly updates as soon as you put the unit on its holder in the van.

TomTom Navigator is a GPS system, all you do is type in where you want to go and it does all the usual GPS stuff. I have been working in East London today, Ilford jobs i would have never found unless i had this today.

Chemi,
If they havn't got anything better to do in the office they are more than welcome to watch me. The thing people forget is that before trackers engineers could be watched, they just phone the sites or send someone out to see where you are.

Regards

Fatboy

[eggs]

These 02 xda's.
Can you load your service manuals in pdf format into them?

Cheers

eggs

[Charnwood]

You sure can, as long as you have got Acrobat reader for pocket pc. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforppc.html

[Andy W]

When I started in 1978 we had to ring in at lunchtime and at 5 pm. If the office wanted you in the mean time they would call you on the job or ring the customer and ask them to ask you to call the office, often the customer would not like you using their phone in those days. When pagers arrived in 1980 we felt like gods with this new technology and it was very posey down the pub when people enquired what you did for a living, must be something important. The problem with pagers, every time you were paged you had to find a phone and if you were on the motorway it was very annoying when the office paged you for something minor and if you had no loose change you had to reverse the charges which the office did not like, you could actually spend a couple pound in change a day on calls. My first car phone in 1991, the black box was the size of a video recorder under the passenger seat and coverage was rubbish, how times have changed. In the late 90's our engineers were encouraged to purchase their own phones with no help from the company and use it for business use and claim the cost of the calls back, they always moaned about the costs, the company got a good deal, to stay in contact with the engineers with out the cost of purchasing a load of phones. I was one of the first to buy a phone, the only drawback was if the standby engineer was not answering his pager at 5.25 pm, the service manager would phone me.

Now stand by, before phones and pagers, we had to ring the office answer phone every 2 hours between 5.30 pm and 10.30 pm in the week and 8.30 am to 10.30 pm at weekends and tap a code with a coin on the mouth piece of the phone, if a lorry went past the call box at he time of tapping the cide was not recognised and you would try again, the pipps would go and that would interrupt the code, start agin....very annoying. When pagers arrived the pager would alert you when a call came in but you would still have to tap the code, thank god for mobile phones. Personally all I want from a phone is a loud ring for when I am in a plant room, large phone book memory and long battery life, thats it, no gimmicks.

You young engineers of today don't know how good you have got it, my dad use to say that to me, he served his time with Prestcold in the 1950's

[eggs]

Do you not think that your office based collegues, used to do their jobs better, befofe the days of mobiles?
It is not long ago, when i would turn up on site, on a monday morning, 300 miles from home.
Every single item of installation goods was there. Nuts, bolts, rivits, duct, cable tray, zebs, gas, nitro, cable etc, etc...

Now you get half way across Manchester and the phone goes "RING, RING"
"Can you just nip to CCL & then to RCL, then while your passing Hilti, just pick up some....."

before you know it you get.

" Why you not on site yet? Dave Nobody from SES,Bailys,AMEC,etc is shouting like F<>K down the phone at me, wanting to know where you are."

"what time you get up?"

"the number you are calling may be switched off, please leave a message after the tone. If you want to re-record your................................................................"

cheers

eggs

[Snowman123]

Xda had a few problems, when the batt goes flat it lost all the memory. Bit of a pain at times. Now got a Motorola A1000