PHONE REPAIR: TECHNICIAN IS A RINGING SUCCESS

In his job as a customer service technician for Southwestern Bell Telephone, Dave Fluegge has found himself in some quaint positions that have included hanging from the side of the Mississippi River bridge here and fighting off large red cockroaches.

Fluegge, 36, of rural Jackson, will have worked for Southwestern Bell 19 years as of July. His wife, Brenda, also works for the phone company as an installer in Jackson, he said.

Primarily Fluegge said he services field switching stations. The stations, several of which are located around Cape Girardeau in either enclosed huts or underground vaults, turn analog voice messages into digital signals to be sent along telephone lines, he said. The signals are then converted to analog for people listening on the other end, Fluegge said.

As for the roaches, Fluegge said, that occurred in Houston in 1974 when he volunteered for a six-week program there. The roaches were found in a certain type of terminal on a telephone pole.

"I remember my first one," he said. "You'd open it up, and I mean there were red cockroaches like this," he said, spacing his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. "I mean you'd open it up and you'd have like 40 or 50 of these things on you."

Fluegge admitted the cockroaches kind of got to him. "Because I was raised on a farm," he said, "I'd just as soon deal with a thousand pound animal as to a spider, a wasp or a roach."

He said he's also spent time here on the Mississippi River Bridge to service a telephone cable to McClure, Ill. The shaking of the bridge by traffic had damaged the cable, he said.

"Everytime we have to go on there to service it we have to call the police department cause they always get calls of jumpers. We've had people stop and yell at us, tell us not to jump," said Fluegge.

The job had to be done at night when there's less traffic, he said. And it was done from a three-cage arrangement on the side of the bridge and over the river.

The last time he worked out on the bridge was about a year ago and the job took about a week, Fluegge said.

"Two years ago I spent two weeks out there on the bridge.... I ended up with a kidney infection.

"It's kind of scary. It's just hard to do to be 120 feet in the air. The wheels of the trucks are right here," he said, placing his hand a short distance in front of his face.

There's been other memorable occurrences in Fluegge's job. Years back, he said, he was in a lady's home on a service call out by Oriole and he noticed a strange noise and odor in her bedroom.

"This lady was real proud and flipped the covers back on the bed I was putting in a jack right beside the bed and there was her chihauhua that just had puppies the night before."

Fluegge said he's also had guns pulled on him, but never by customers. The guns were brandished by police officers, he said.

Once, he said, he tripped a motion alarm in a Cape Girardeau building that had a terminal located in the basement. All of the sudden, he said, a Cape Girardeau police officer was on the scene with a gun and flashlight in his face.

"I did it one time," Fluegge said. "I learned my lesson then."

Fluegge said when he got into maintenance work with the telephone company in 1974, the job was simpler.

"What we did then, working on people's phones, you could take somebody off the street and two months' time train them...," he said.

The equipment service technicians must work on today is more complicated, he said. There's also items today like fax machines, he said. Plus, he said, the customer is more critical of what he or she wants.

"You do need a little more technical expertise. I'd say (before) you could run almost everything by ear. The type of service we provided, it was an unusual case of trouble that you had to break out test gear."

Fluegge said he works as part of a 15-member telephone service crew. He and a few others handle more specialized tasks, he said, but they all work at times what is known as "trouble." Trouble, he said, is when a residential or business customer's phone service malfunctions and repair service is needed.

"When a heavy rain comes, everyone works trouble," he said.