Calling Procedure Changes

Brothers and Sisters,

Please see the downloads page for specific calling procedure changes for Houston Zone 3 and Zone 4 Pools that are due to take effect July 9th at 08:00 hours. Please take heed that these changes only apply to the pools. EVERYTHING else remains the same. We will work on other areas in the future. These changes were made with the intention of eliminating some of the middle of the night calls to unqualified individuals and/or those that simply don’t take the calls. For instance, removed are the calls to locals and yard engineers on their off days. Changed is the xe03 and xe04 directly supporting each other. We tried to get the most qualified, most rested, most ready to go to work engineer to get called first. CMS’s objective was to simplify things so that they can rely more on the AVR system before a crew caller has to take over.

If you are an engineer who likes to step up, or take extra work, please go into CMTS and take advantage of the request extra work (REW)option. Step two in all areas is to pull from this list. You can select a date range and if you want just your territory or all territories.

For Zone 4 engineers, step 3 is first five in pool. This means if extraboard is exhausted and no one in the pool has requested extra work, the first available in the first 5 positions on the pool will fill the vacancy. If no one is available in top five, the system moves on to the next step.

Zone 4 extraboards take note that you were added to protect the RE24 pool towards the end of the calling procedures, only required if you answer the phone and qualified/familiar.

Please take note of when acceptance is required and when acceptance is required if contacted. If acceptance is required, you must take the call or risk a missed call. If acceptance required if contacted, for example the bump board, and you answer the phone, the call is yours if qualified/familiar on the territory being filled. If you’re skeptical about taking a call, let it go to voicemail first. CMS practice is to attempt to call for 30 minutes, all phone numbers on file, prior to accessing a missed call. A typical sign that you’re required, or at least CMS thinks your required, to take the call is that they call you repeatedly. In this case you may want to answer and deal with the situation.

Fraternally,

Houston BLET Local Chairman

Zone 3- RE23, RE24, XE23 Hayden Parsons- (832) 732-4890

Zone 4- RE06, RE15, RE29, XE04 Ron Caswell- (832) 259-6412

Zone 4- RE03, XE03 Kevin DeArment- (832) 795-2042