Bell Operators Give Better Service.........color code for multi-pair Telco cables
I remember learning it as the basic Blue-Orange-Green-Brown-Slate when I was a summer hire for NY Telco in college doing service disconnect equipment pickups and prewiring out of the Westchester County Greenburgh garage, just off of I-287. Prewiring was a lot more fun than disconnects. I had a telco van (Corvair Greenbrier) where you sat ahead of the front wheels,it took a bit of getting used to making sharp turns from there. Loaded up the truck with big spools of four pair and a big electric drill that had a small lead acid battery in a metal box about the size of a lunch pail. Went out to subdivisions and individual houses under construction and ran wiring throughout the houses after they were framed up but before the walls were closed in. NY Tel did the prewiring free of charge then, having outlets all over the house meant more customers wanting to have extensions. On some big house jobs I would put in 16 pair. Also helped pull a lot of 16 pair through office building overheads, and punch the wiring onto the big white termination blocks.
In those pre-GPS days I had to navigate around Westchester using one of those big street atlases. Since I lived over in Rockland County, and only had been driving for a few years, I knew very little about getting around Westchester.
I once got to a job site and my big reel of 4 pair was missing from the van, and the back door was open. Apparently a few miles back the door popped open going over a bump, and out the reel went. I backtracked my route and an old geezer was sitting in a lawn chair by the side of the road with my cable reel. "Figured you would be back for it eventually." , he said.
