I worked for a while as a contract tech writer at Lucent (the spun-off version of Bell Labs after the AT&T split) in the 90s. It was an interesting company to w

I worked for a while as a contract tech writer at Lucent (the spun-off version of Bell Labs after the AT&T split) in the 90s. It was an interesting company to work for, although the biggest memories I have are of the hardbound notebooks they had which had page numbers (something I didn’t see again until I came across Leuchtturm notebooks decades later), winning the contest for longest commute during bike-to-work week (I biked from my apartment on the Near North Side of Chicago to suburban Lisle, a distance of about 30 miles), a discussion about whether bananas were technically fruits (I remember people coming to the incorrect decision they weren’t, not realizing that the black spots in the middle of the banana are seeds) and a trainer who gave the writers a course on cell phone technology going into great detail about his ham radio hobby. It was a great company to work at, but the commute was pretty awful and I ended up moving on after a year there.