GOODMAN & LANAGAN EXCHANGES 2001

Finley Engineering Company, Inc. July 16th, 2001 I was requested to meet KIM LITTLE on a rainy Monday morning at the Lamar office at 7a.m. I was prompt and Kim was waiting on the sidewalk outside the office. This was our first time together. I followed Kim to Seneca, Mo. I am familiar with wet weather driving and when he started pushing 70 (which I was already not comfortable with), in a pouring down rain, I decided if I lost sight of him, he could come back and find me, or wait at the Seneca phone office until I found it. I can put this together with a lot of his other actions and this is just a symptom, a symptom of his irrational mind in how he views things. We made it there together in our separate trucks. He was driving his old blue truck so he could charge Finley's mileage for the miles. Kim was friendly in a business way. His brother Ed was late, but showed up for the meeting. I had been told I could work on some projects for Seneca Telephone Co. I was still "on loan" to ITD. Goodman & Lanagan were the two exchanges to be upgraded & reinforced. I didn't realize Ed Little was to be my work partner. In the Tennessee project Ed didn't impress me with his work. Ed & I finished Goodman & moved to Lanagan. Ed had to quit a a week or 2 before Lanagan was done. We started Lanagan 8/27/2001. It ended 11/29/2001 with Ed leaving a little before this. I took week off. After Ed left I reviewed what he'd done. There were 133 record sheets covering Lanagan. We were to take our field notes on these sheets. Ed, I discovered after he left, had done 11, that's 11 sheets, of the 133. I did the rest (122). I said, "Never again will Ed Little and I do anything together jobwise." In doing Goodman I called Kim one day and asked if I could do a little rerouting of the original plans. I was driving north out of town on the main road that leads into a county road. It came to a point where it veered to the right and a ways down another road took off that one that headed sort of north and then back northwest. It finally made a sharp turn and was on true north again. I had noticed a fence line in a pasture which due to where it was I figured it was a section and property line. The way around the road was troublesome and difficult in terrain. I thought that it made sense to contact the property owner and see if we could get an easement to go along the fence line till we reached the true north road again. It shortened up the cable distance and made construction a whole lot easier. Kim allowed it but seemed disturbed that I had a brain and could use it. I remember Ed Little had a problem in the bank in Goodman. It was a situation where Ed needed to bring a new cable inside the building and terminate it. He just couldn't imagine how to draw that. I finally held his hand and we did it together. Ed would act like he knew so much and he'd done that before, but, well, talk is cheap as we all know. Lanagan was a mess in reference to the existing phone records. They needed updating mostly and what we found was that so much of the information on the records was not what you found in the field and resulted in us having to invest more time and effort than originally thought. These jobs were done just before Clay Beard & I were sent to the Stella & Powell projects.
An added note: Chuck Kirby had his initials all over those Lanagan phone record sheets and my memory is cloudy on this but the impression was that Chuck had done work with those records and it seemed he might have been in part to blame for the condition they were in. Remember, Chuck is the guy that brags on being able to stake 10-15 miles a day. This could explain a lot right there. Chuck, I don't know. He was a good guy but he was such a whiner. Everybody reading my blog I'm sure, has decided I'm a whiner. I feel at least my whine has good reason. I have worked with Chuck a little and long ago. The one thing that upset me with Chuck was when I became an employee in the ITD dept. I spent a little time in the office and Kim handed the job of answering my questions to Chuck. Chuck picked on the size of symbol I was using for pedestals and so I went over a number of sheets and changed them. It was later that it came to my attention that some other notes unrelated to what I was doing had the same size symbols that I had been asked to redo. What was that Chuck, initiation to ITD for the new guy?