e USOC codes. Another group supporting the business office was the service observers. The observers were hidden away in a nearby unmarked office. Throughout the day, they listened in on a random sam- pling of calls for each unit. This was to ensure that a high quality of service was maintained and that accurate information was be- ing given out. The worst thing that could happen to a unit was to get a "scoring," meaning that the service observer had heard some- thing wrong. The observer would come racing into the business office and post the scoring on a bulletin board for all to see. Natu- rally, the members of the unit, including the BOS, were humiliated for the remainder of the day. We never knew which of the six members of the unit got the scoring. There were different types of scorings. One was CWI (Cus- tomer Waiting Interval), meaning that a representative had left a customer on hold for an unacceptable amount of time. Another was ICR (ncorrect Rate), usually a result of someone adding the component rates of an order incorrectly (by hand - there were no adding machines on our desks). Another was IHM. I can't re- member exactly what it stood for (Inhospitable Manner?), but it meant that a representative had handled the customer in a less than pleasant way. This was the worst type of scoring to get and one that promoted the most speculation about who did it and what was said. When I transferred from New York Telephone to Southwest- ern Bell, first in St. Louis and then in Kansas City, the business 306 : The Telecom Handbook CHAPTER 14 offices were carbon copies of the one I left behind in New York. Nevertheless, each required a month in a training class before I was put back on the desk to talk to the customers. The old Bell System was just that, a system and a very good one. The rigidity of structure and customer service monitoring worked well for a company which was regulated by the govern- ment and, as a monopoly, had no competition. As competition emerged, first for telephone systems, then for long dista