Outside Phone Tech vs Office Job (career, company, good, security)

[vacuumbed]

Hi everyone,
I'm a 44 year old guy in good shape and I am at a turning point with my 15 year career with the phone company. I have to decide whether to be an outside tech (Doing repairs and installs) or have an office job designing circuits. I currently work in the office taking customer calls.

Any thoughts on this?

What is nice about the outside tech job is focusing on one job at a time, where in an office job it seems like you have to multi task a lot these days.

Thanks in advance.

[sware2cod]

Inside job designing circuits. I actually did this job for the phone company before. It's nice because you have a normal steady workload and you aren't subject to the urgencies that could occur when you visit customer sites for outages or cutovers.

If you go outside to customer sites, you will likely have many urgent issues/outages/late orders with tight timelines. Also you will have to deal with finding parking and having to haul your equipment to the job site from the vehicle. Also wasted time waiting for security to allow you into the work site. Also there could be visits to work sites at odd (often cutovers are evenings) or in crime areas. Also you will have to deal with traffic issues and weather issues.

But if you hate office work, maybe the offsite work is better for you so you aren't stuck in the same cube every day, with the same co-workers.