Oh yes, the service rep test was similar, even advising to stop, go back to say, question 27, erase your original entry (for example, "A") and change it to (for example, "C"). I took the test in 1991 and they were still using the AT&T testing system from prior to divestiture in 1984. Once on the job, the test made sense. You did a lot of hopping around both within and between several applications during almost all customer contacts. I learned to love SORD (Service Order Retrieval & Distribution), which to this day has the last word in the service order process. It's the most user UN-friendly system on earth. Pull it up and you get a black screen with two widely spaced vertical blue bars, and a cursor blinking at top left. That's all. You had to know what to ask it to do before you got any kind of template to work from. Except for customer information, everything else typed in SORD consisted of USOCs and FIDs (Field Identifiers). FIDS came in two types: fixed and floating. This axiom was shared early on: You can't float a fixed FID and you can't fix a floating FID. It was very satisfying to "dogleg" an order in SORD (Shift key + 6) to send it through, and have it actually go without tripping you up for an error. Sometimes there would be "ghosts" and you'd have to space through blank areas you suspected might contain them. Archaic beyond belief, but still in use today. They're going to have to do something about that because they haven't been letting residential service reps access SORD for several years and they're going to run out of people who have the knowledge to work in that system to correct orders, etc. My guess is that such work will be batched out to service reps who handle orders for business customers. They still have to work in SORD for a lot of what they do.
Chuck, you are absolutely right about the dialing tool. Ma Bell issued them for exactly the opposite reason they were distributed for subscriber use. A lot of people used pencils or whatever was handy, and the paint-on-porcelain dial plate was damaged over time. Since nobody owned their phones, they could just call and ask for a new dial plate, or more likely they'd be issued a new dial assembly or the whole phone would be replaced. The characters on these dial plates varied according to the type of service an area had. Rural areas with small enough exchanges didn't need letters, so all they had were large black numbers on those plates.
