When Kenny was thinking about taking the latest early retirement offer from the telephone company, he said that he was thinking that he would use the incentive money to move his family down to Florida and try to find a job doing the cabling work for another telephone company like ABC Telecom. He was showing me a magazine that was all about the telecommunications business, and there were a lot of advertisements and listings from companies that were hiring people in the industry.

I was quite amazed to see dozens of listing for employment opportunities for experienced Central Office Equipment Installation Technicians in foreign countries! Kenny explained to me that a lot of the older systems that his work crew had been ripping out of the old central offices were actually being sold to foreign countries for them to use in their telecommunications infrastructure. The equipment that our telephone companies were retiring and “junking out” that was over twenty or thirty years old was actually an “upgrade” to these other countries’ systems!

Just learning that made me stop and think for just a moment about how much technology has advanced over the past few decades, and how we, as citizens of the United States are blessed to have access to the newest technologies. There have been times that I’ve seen television shows, and gone to museum exhibits and learned about third world countries that take things that have been cast off by other countries and ended up using them to improve their lives. The old adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is as true today as it was in my grandparent’s day!