"But seriously."
"Seriously," Lyman said. "Seriously. Think a second about the scale of a
telco. Of this telco. The thousands of kilometers of wire in the
ground. Switching stations. Skilled linesmen and
cable-pullers. Coders. Switches. Backhaul. Peering arrangements. We've
got it all. Ever get on a highway and hit a flat patch where you can't
see anything to the horizon except the road and the telephone poles and
the wires? Those are *our wires*. It's a lot of goodness, especially for
a big, evil phone company.
"So we've got a lot of smart hackers. A lot of cool toys. A gigantic
budget. The biggest network any of us could ever hope to manage -- like
a model train set the size of a city.
"That said, we're hardly nimble. Moving a Bell is like shifting a
battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick. It can be done,
but you can spend ten years doing it and still not be sure if you've
made any progress. From the outside, it's easy to mistake 'slow' for
'evil.' It's easy to make that mistake from the inside, too.
"But I don't let it get me down. It's *good* for a Bell to be slow and
plodding, most of the time. You don't want to go home and discover that
we've dispatched the progress-ninjas to upgrade all your phones with
video screens and a hush mode that reads your thoughts. Most of our
customers still can't figure out voice mail.
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