The phone on my desk rang, and I answered with happiness, Hotline! It was my friend Ali, and that’s how we always answered our phones during the summer of 1982. We both had internships at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Ali at headquarters in New Jersey, me at the Allentown, PA satellite campus. Whenever my phone rang it was Ali. No one else called either of us, all summer long.
I'm sick of wearing Mary Tyler Moore clothes, Ali complained. She was a college rugby player whom I’d never seen wearing anything other than sweatpants. Her silent protest at AT&T was to outfit herself for the summer in ironically girly blouses, pastel-colored cardigan sweaters, skirts and penny loafers. No one else got the joke, but I loved it.
Ali was the only double-X physics major her year at Dartmouth. She was a year behind Kim-eye and me, who were the only double-X physics majors our year, unless you count Betsy. Now, there was nothing wrong with Betsy except that she didn’t hang around with Kim-eye, Ali and me.
Kim-eye started work at IBM right after she and I (and, presumably, Betsy) graduated. I had the summer to kill before starting graduate school in the fall---hence the summer internship. At age twenty-one, Kim-eye was ready to be a grownup, while I elected to continue my childhood by invoking that period of arrested development known as graduate school.
It’s the absolute truth that I went to graduate school chiefly to avoid getting a job.
AT&T had a summer internship program for women and minorities in engineering. Ali and I were women, so we applied. When I got a phone call from HR offering me the position, I was over-the-moon to find out that I would be paid $345 a month, for three months, the whole summer. I wrote on my notepad, $345! I’d never been paid more than minimum wage before. Then I read the letter that followed the phone call. Holy ATM, it was $345 a week! Sign me up!
The other good news was that I could live with my parents and pocket the full paycheck, minus taxes. The bad news was that I had to live with my parents.
My dad worked at the same facility, so I drove him to work every day in my car, a dark blue Chevy Chevette with two thick, parallel lighter-blue racing stripes running the length of the car. At the back of the car the stripes took an upward turn to keep the car from actually flying, like two light blue spoilers.
Partway through the summer, Dad told me he wanted to drive himself.
Why? I asked. He said, It’s your singing, especially first thing in the morning. But also on the way home.
My singing? I said. What’s wrong with my singing?
He said, I mostly don’t mind it. Except, why do you have to sing every voice part?
Let’s say you’re singing the soprano part, but then the sopranos cut out while the tenor soloist does his thing. Can you reasonably be expected to just sit quietly and drive? There's no time to start a conversation, because the sopranos are coming back in, only a few measures later. At most a page. I feel that as long as you can sing the tenor solo in the right octave, singing along is one hundred percent allowed. Even encouraged, to keep your full vocal range exercised.
Now, when a soprano sings the bass part and has to drop out on the lower notes, I think that’s okay too. Or you can bump it up an octave, but only when no one else is in the car. You can also make a growly sound in place of the notes too low to reach.
Or you can drive yourself, which is what my dad decided to do.
My boss for my AT&T summer internship was named Thrygve. I knew how to pronounce it because his son was in my class in school, a squirrelly little buck-toothed guy who barely spoke. Thrygve dad and Thrygve son lived up the street from us, less than a block away, in the house on the corner across from our bus stop. It’s TRIG-vee, by the way.
On the first day of my internship, Thrygve The Senior called me into his office to explain what my project would be. Note that I hadn't thought to ask this ahead of time, perhaps because I was dazzled by the handsome paycheck.
If only I had.
At work Thrygve The Senior was known as Thryg (TRIG). No one ever called Thrygve The Junior Thryg or Trigger or Triggy-Wiggy. He had no nickname. Thrygve The Junior was shy and horn-rim-bespectacled and small and backgroundly. I’m relatively comfortable in my scathing condemnation of Thrygve because it takes one to know one.
Now that I think about it, the only tangible differences between Thrygve and me were his freckles and Y chromosome.
Anyway, Thrygve's father, Thryg, called me into his office on my first day of work and said that I’d be working on undersea aging of surface acoustic wave devices. At the end of the sentence, I fell asleep.
Some necessary background: For the last three weeks of college, I was working madly to finish my senior thesis. I’d horribly underestimated the time it was going to take to complete it, and during those three weeks I averaged three hours of sleep per day, usually in the pattern of six, zero, six, zero. Driving home from college at the end of those three weeks, I fell asleep on Route 91 and drove off into the shoulder, where the car rolled to an uneventful stop. Luckily I was following my parents, and they pulled over. After that Mom drove their car home while Dad drove mine. I was kind of narcoleptic for the next month or so, while I recovered.
The funniest part of falling asleep in my boss’s office that first morning is that I don’t think he noticed. He kept droning on about surface acoustic waves while my chin rested on my chest and I breathed deeply. His words denatured into a lulling noise that supported my snooze.
At the end of our illustrious first meeting, Thryg led me to my office-slash-lab. The walk woke me up, and I was a bit refreshed by the ten- or twenty- or sixty-minute nap in Thyrg’s office. I know not how long.
On the lab bench next to my desk was a small rig, about a foot long. Thryg explained that my job was to solder a surface acoustic wave (SAW) device into the rig, and then crank up the power. The next day I was to measure the device to see if it had failed. Electrically-speaking.
What do I do for the rest of the day, while it’s in the rig? I asked. Thryg considered this for a moment and said, Well, you can read papers about surface acoustic waves.
Turned out that soldering the device into place took about fifty-five seconds, once I had a little practice, and then slowly ramping the power to the prescribed setting took five seconds. That left seven hours and fifty-nine minutes per day to read papers on surface acoustic waves. And eat lunch.
Now, I didn’t know the first thing about surface acoustic waves, but after reading the first paper, I knew as much as I really wanted to know. Definitely enough to solder in a device and turn a dial.
So I checked out the rest of my lonely office. In the top desk drawer was a phone directory, slightly more interesting than paper number two on surface acoustic wave devices. As I perused it, I discovered to my excitement that I could call any number within the AT&T company for free, by dialing the four-number extension. For free! This was a time when long-distance calls were a line item in the family budget. You had to pay to call the next town, even if it had the same area code.
Ali worked at AT&T in New Jersey, so I called her desk and explained this unexpected benefit to our both working for the same company. The Hotline was born, and we used it frequently. The Hotline saved the summer.
Next item on my agenda for day one: learn how to solder. I walked down the hall and knocked on Thryg’s office door.
I don’t know how to solder, I said. He didn’t roll his eyes, but I could read the thought bubble above his head, as Lee would say.
He sent one of the technicians to my bench to teach me how to solder. I got pretty good at it. The internship was not entirely wasted. Apart from a hefty paycheck I gained an important life skill.
I enjoy surprising people with my soldering skills. It's right up there with my ability to say, How are you? in Hebrew, taking pains to match the question to the apparent gender of the questioned. I don’t know what to do about nonbinaries, because they hadn’t been invented when I learned my two Hebrew phrases. Please leave a comment if you know.
That first week of work I really did read a lot of papers on surface acoustic waves. I also napped off and on to accelerate my recovery from the pseudo-narcolepsy. Some of the journals containing the SAW papers may have drool marks. Sorry about that. I just blotted them with a paper towel and put them back in the library.
By the end of the first week, I could solder and explain what the project was about, in case you’re dying to know. If not, skip the next few paragraphs.
Well, AT&T had cables that stretched under the ocean so that phone calls could reach distant lands like Europe, and possibly other continents that AT&T cared about.
This was back when wireless communication meant telegrams, and optical fibers were still a laboratory curiosity. Your super-expensive phone call from New York to London would travel through actual metal wires, twisted into cables and sheathed, thousands of miles long.
The problem was that the electronic signal representing your voice saying something like, Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!—well, that signal would start to get very weak, a few hundred miles out. So a magical device called a signal regenerator was invented. It amplified the dying signal, boosting it enough to make it to the next signal regenerator. And so on, across the ocean. Boost, boost, boost, boost, boost, London!
These signal regenerators used surface acoustic waves, and if you want to learn more about those, leave me your mailing address and I’ll see whether the AT&T library still has those journals. Be advised that some of the pages are a little wrinkled from decades-old drool.
If one of these signal regenerators failed, you’d have to send a diver out to the deep ocean to replace it. A worse job than my summer internship, though it probably paid at least twice as much. Soldering in cold salt water is a lot more difficult than soldering in my office. And a wet suit is more annoying than Mary Tyler Moore clothes.
So my job was to see how long a signal regenerator would last. Now, even Thryg knew that a summer intern would be bored if she (or minority he) just plugged in the device once at the beginning of the summer and then measured it at the end. So the idea was to accelerate the aging of the device by cranking up the power.
Admittedly, we were making the questionable assumption that subjecting the device to high power for a short time would have a similar effect on the electrical properties of the device as functioning under normal power for a long time. But as I found out, asking questions was not part of the job.
Also, if the power aging---as it was called---failed to have an effect, well you just cranked the power higher the next day. Experimental design was on par with that of a middle-school science project, one that at best would garner a B if you had neat handwriting.
My friend Ali told me about her middle school science project, one afternoon on the Hotline. She was testing the effects of watering a houseplant with vinegar. A real-world problem, if you think about acid rain and then lower the pH by a few notches. Like power aging of SAW devices, this was power acid-raining of houseplants. A good young scientist, Ali included a control plant that she watered with H2O from the tap. The vinegar plant lost all its leaves in two weeks. Unfortunately so did the control plant. So she performed a Holmesian Maneuver and glued the leaves back onto the control plant.
On my second day of the AT&T internship, after a day of power aging for the SAW device and a good night’s sleep for me, I unsoldered the device from the rig and took it to the measurement lab. In that lab were an engineer, two technicians, and the measurement station, busily buzzing about.
The guys showed me how to take the measurement: You plug the device into a socket, and then start up a computer program. A computer program, back in 1982! Now this was Bell Laboratories, cutting edge to the max! After ten minutes, the program plotted the device’s current-voltage curve on the dot-matrix printer. The shape of the curve would tell you whether the device was still operating properly, starting to fail, or completely dead. These guys were measuring every single device, because quality control of the signal regenerators was critical.
How many of them are bad? I asked---really just to make conversation. I didn’t get to see humans all that often during the workday.
About half of them, they answered.
Hmmm. That's a lot of dead devices, I said. I had a thought.
So I said, what if we could do a quick measurement up front, just to see if the device is completely dead? Then we could weed out the dead ones right away and reserve the full-blown current-voltage characterization, the ten-minute version, for the others.
They got excited. I think they had dull jobs, too.
Now, I’d take one computer science class in college, and programmed an Apple Lisa to turn a light bulb on in a physics lab, so I was pretty much an expert. I took the program they had, and derived a short-n-sweet version the next day that told them in fifteen seconds whether or not the device was totally dead. It was the most fun I'd had all summer, other than talking on the Hotline with Ali. Could have been the most fun they had all summer, too. The engineer and technicians thanked me for making their work easier, more efficient. High fives all around. We had high fives back then, but not fist bumps.
I wondered what they were going to do with their extra time. Surely they’ve already read all the SAW articles.
I was pretty pleased with myself, felt a sense of accomplishment. I’d done something useful! I'd made people happy! Then Thryg found out. He called me into his office and reprimanded me for interfering with the work of the quality control group. Stick to reading the surface acoustic wave papers, he said.
I learned a two things that summer: 1) soldering, and 2) ask what your job will be like before you agree to it. These have served me well.
At the end of the summer, I took off to graduate school for a decade, to lick my wounds and delay getting a real job. Those didn't look like much fun.
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