So in the morning, just bring the laptop out to the vehicle.
We just plug it in and then we log in.
So at the moment we've got an 8-12 appointment this morning.
We get provided with our own vehicle, drill, bits and pieces.
We've got some spare phones. We carry all our safety gear as well.
Different test equipment so we've got meters.
We basically carry everything we might need for the day.
My name's Tammy. I'm a Telstra cable technician.
I did a 9-month traineeship through Skilled Group.
They offer in-classroom training and on-the-job training.
And now basically I've got my own vehicle and we just work independently
throughout the day to complete the jobs for the customer.
The customer's having an issue with their fax machine.
They're unable to send or receive faxes at the moment.
So we just need to have a chat to the customer and find out what's going on.
Hello. My name's Tammy and I'm calling from Telstra in Perth. How are you doing today?
I've just picked up the job to come and take a look at the line for you.
I just want to confirm with you what sort of issues we're having.
So we're just having some trouble sending and receiving faxes. Is that correct?
OK. All right. It sounds like that could be something to do with the issue. But that's OK.
We can come out and have a look at it for you and just sort of see what's going on..
OK. Thanks very much. Bye.
I haven't received a fax. That's not unusual. I'm might or might not have but... OK.
Everything's plugged in correctly and it's all up and running so it looks OK.
Yeah, we've just got a diversion tone. Yes, so we've
got normal dial tone again. And the diversion's off.
So are you getting sort of any error message like
or does it just say unable to send or something?
It just comes up 'please ring Telstra'. OK.
That's all it said. Then gave me the number.
Just wondering if you can give me some details on a customer service.
Well, basically, what's happened is the customer's had...
Before this I actually worked in retail,
so there was a bit of computer work just doing up rosters and you know keeping track
of money and all that sort of stuff so there was a bit of computer stuff involved.
Just had sort of As and Bs when I finished high
school, so it was just a standard sort of thing.
Obviously if you have any IT sort of background or anything like that, then that obviously
helps you to advance a bit quicker or you'll probably pick up the skills a bit quicker.
But yeah...
Welcome to Telstra. Tammy speaking.
OK.
Sounds better.
One page sent.
Beautiful. OK.
Great. All right. Beautiful. Thank you very much. Not a problem.
The National Broadband Network which is the NBN is coming through
at the moment and that's where they're installing optic fibre.
It's going to be from the exchange at this point to the customer's premises.
So that's going to make all the copper cabling obsolete.
Am, Optic fibre obviously provides a lot faster services and better services than what the
copper can and basically means that we shouldn't really have to be doing any work on it.
Once optic fibre is in place, there's very little
chance of it going faulty or anything going wrong.
So it's more of a... I guess an assured service as well, because we're
not expecting or anticipating any problems with it once it goes in.
Welcome to Telstra. Tammy speaking. Yep. And his number is?
So I just got a call from our head office.
Amm..One of our other techs actually needs an assist to do some cabling.
There's no lead-in cable or any cable inside the building in place as far as he's told me,
so I thought I'd go and have a look at what he's doing and give him a hand to run some
cabling and hopefully we can put a socket on and get the customer up and running.
So you reckon the easiest way is we just dig and put the pipe into there?
So, as far as we can gather at the moment, they've put some pipe in but
they haven't actually connected it to the pipe coming out of our pit,
so when we've put the rods down, it's actually going under the driveway now.
So if we were going to connect it how they'd originally done it,
we'd have to actually remove the pavers in the
driveway and that's going to be quite a big issue.
So it might be easier for us if we can dig a trench from here to the wall,
we'll just install a pipe in here and just finish installing what needs to be done.
The challenge in this job is obviously being outdoors in the weather conditions.
So in summer it gets quite hot and obviously in winter we've got to deal with
the storms and rain where we can't do a lot of work while that's happening.
It's quite physical, so the further you go out, you know, towards the bushland, it becomes
a lot harder to find the cable pits. It's in different locations and stuff like that.
I'm learning new systems at the moment, different bits and pieces
but ideally I would like to move into more sort of
complex roles and just learn more skills as we go
so there is a lot of opportunity to up-skill and there's different
areas within the Telstra company you can actually work in
so, you know, if you change - if you don't want to be working
on the actual network, there's stuff like network integrity.
There's the people in head office so you can do that sort of stuff.
It just depends on what you're interested in.
Now I am noticing something wrong here where it's disconnected at the back.
I just want to test the line to the customer's house and just sort of
see if there is any faults in the line and what's actually going on.
That doesn't look too bad. I'll just have a look at the rest of it.
So I'll just press test on there and we'll just sort of see what results we're getting.
So we've got the line open here at the moment so this will test from the exchange
to where the line's open here. It'll just give us an idea if there's any issues.
At the moment the dial tone is working here and clear here,
so we might have to go to the house and just see if anyone's
home and just check out what's going on there as well so...
So I've just checked the line at the wall box at the side of the house.
Now we've got a clear dial tone there,
so that generally indicates there could be a problem
with the customer's internal cabling inside the building
or it could be that the switched legs back at the cabinet was the
issue that was cutting off the dial tone and we've fixed that up.
So what we'll do is we'll give the customer a few
more minutes to see if they're going to come home.
If they're still not available we actually leave a card in the
letterbox just to say what time we attended and what we found.
If they're still having a problem, they can book an appointment when someone can be home
and we can come out and have a look inside the
house and just find out what's going on for them.
So that's the next step.