Warren,
There was a piece in the news day before yesterday I believe it was about the company Tru works for laying off or cutting back. As for people no longer being employed, when I was working for the phone company in the late 60s they had over 100K employees in Northern Calif. countying the outside people and were trying to hire more. Then we started putting in the computers and by 1978 the number in this area was down from over 37,000 to just around 260. Now I understand they are down to less than 100 as everything is done from the tech center in San Ramon. The field techs no longer need to know anything except how to get to the various offices and call in and they will run the tests at the tech center and tell them what to do. I still call in and talk to some of the 2nd tier techs once in a while and they tell me it is amazing at the amount of people the various companies have gotten rid of.
Ron
