One last look

Like the Brazil nut, arguably the perfect food, Mother's Day is truly the perfect special occasion. (And it was last Sunday, in case you forgot!) It is a day that honors those responsible for what may be our only true miracles. Nobody complains about the commercialization of Mother's Day, or about the hectic pace, or the burdensome obligation like they do about other holidays -- at least not out loud, if they know what's good for them. Mother's Day is for many the happiest of occasions.

For some of us, it is a more nostalgic experience--wonderful memories of days never to return. It was in this nostalgic frame of mind last week that I drove from Chicago to St. Louis to moderate a panel at an NTCA conference and committed what my mother used to say was one of my worst sins--fretting over the past. "Forget it. It's over. There's livin' to do," she'd say. 

She'd also say, "Don't drink that before you go to bed." But that's a different story.

I fed my nostalgia and my melancholy--and grievously sinned in my mother's eyes--by visiting three places I used to work (and one, coincidently, at which I used to play) on my way to St. Louis. Not for the last time did I think I should have listened to my mother.

The trip highlighted for me how much things have changed in this industry in a few short years.  

My first stop was just a few short blocks from my current downtown Chicago office. On the fifth floor at 212 W. Washington, a couple of hundred Ameritech co-workers and I used to monitor the switches and central offices in the city. We also did switch, trunk and Centrex translations, took off-hour trouble reports and ate Gold Coast hotdogs. It was the busiest of places at what we all thought was one of the premier Baby Bells.

No more. Not only is the Ameritech name history, one can't even get past the front door of this building unless he or she is the owner of one of the $300,000 condos that now occupy the fifth floor.

So I drove 85 miles southwest to a little town called Norway. It was the first Norwegian settlement in Illinois. However, I don't think the word ever got back to the rest of the Norwegians, because the population never got much above 50. Just out side of Norway, closer to Stavenger, was an AT&T Communications Facility Maintenance and Administration Center (FMAC) where a  hundred of us used to coordinate T1 and T3 provisioning or work at the private line board or the restoration console for the fiber and microwave radio networks crossing AT&T's 10-state central region.

No more. There is a padlock on the gate. Weeds are beginning to poke through the cracks in the parking lot. Birds flitter about the latticework of the microwave tower as if it were a giant set of monkey bars. It is a facility frozen in time. I even stopped by the Prairie Lake Lodge Golf (and Gun) Club (only in the country do people equate their four-iron with their shotgun), where we'd escape a couple of times a summer. Change, such as the closing of the Norway facility, has its residual effects as well. It was a gorgeous day, five o'clock in the afternoon, but most of the golf carts were parked and I stood alone at the bar nursing a beer and imagining the laughter of the people I used to know.

I felt my mother shaking her head. "Let it go," I swear I heard her say. "Things change."

Heedless as usual of her good advice, I drove two hours south on I-55 and stopped in Springfield to visit the old Ameritech Cellular Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO.) (Even the term MTSO didn't survive the years.) I used to spend a lot of time there in support of Ameritech's WAN and early efforts at wireless data. The Datakit, circuit switched data modem pools and CDPD equipment that brought me there are all gone or soon will be--obsolete in some cases, failed business cases in the other. The cell tower is still there, sticking up out of the flat landscape like Donald Trump's hair on a windy day. But the people are gone. I believe the office is run remotely out of St. Louis or somewhere. The entrance to the rear parking lot--and thus the basketball court--was blocked by a U.S. Cellular truck, maybe a cell-on-wheels (COW). Who knows? 

So I drove on passed the Comfort Suites I occasionally called home and saw a new Hooters right next door--which I can't imagine would have been approved had Jim Edgar still been Governor, nor approved of by my mother. I then passed Lake Springfield, swept south around the bend and on westward to St. Louis.

There, I was to participate in a discussion about VoIP with a large group of rural telco providers, for whom change is coming fast. Thinking about my trip, and the approaching Sunday on which my mother-in-law (bless her heart) is still around to get her due, I was struck not by how much had changed over the last decade, but how once change is initiated, there is no going back. There's no more SCC, no more FMAC, no more MTSO.

As rural telephone companies and others grapple with decisions about deploying VoIP and associated wireless technologies, they stand at a threshold of change from which there will be no return. The change is inevitable. The pace will be quick. And in five or 10 years, some nostalgia-bitten phone guy will get the urge look back. Too late. Ma Bell had her last Mother's Day a long time ago.

With that, I turned my eyes to the road ahead. You hear me, Ma?

E-mail me at tmcelligott@primediabusiness.com.