The strike is over, for now, and Verizon is up and running with employees back on the job, but the work stoppage took a toll on those many who went for two weeks without a paycheck.

While the picketers were doing their thing, members of the community, particularly workers from NSTAR and Boston firefighters, were showing their support for the union side.

Joe Baker, owner of the Sugarbowl Café on Dorchester Avenue, provided water and coffee to the picketers at the Boston Street location. “I have five children myself and I wouldn’t want to suddenly be with no paycheck or no income,” said Baker, whose brother Frank is a candidate in the District 3 City Council election. “Plus,” Baker said, “If I swing a few guys over the my place from Dunkin Donuts when the strike’s over, that couldn’t hurt either.”

While sympathy for the picketers was high for some, others complained about Verizon workers harassing customers at service locations. “I can tell you that unfortunately there have been physical and verbal abuse of our management employees during the strike by a few bad actors,” said Phil Santoro, managing director for Verizon’s northeast region. “Most of them have been caught. We will deal with that appropriately.”

Santoro could not say if any such cases took place at Dorchester locations, but he said that there were incidents at “virtually all locations in Eastern Massachusetts.”

Paul Feeney, spokesperson for the local IBEW 2222, said he is glad the strike is over and that people are back to work, but that the whole thing could have been avoided in the first place.

“We wouldn’t have minded going to the table to talk about concessions,” Feeney said. “But the way the contract would have worked out, they could tell us tomorrow that they’re going to take all of those jobs over to the Philippines. We can bargain over health care, we can’t bargain over this.”

Earlier this month, 45,000 union employees from Verizon walked off the job and into strategic positions outside company buildings and across from job sites throughout the United States, including three locations in Dorchester: The Verizon store on Gallivan Boulevard, a center on Boston Street, and a call center on Adams Street attracted some 100 strikers holding signs reading “On Strike against Verizon” and “No Scabs Allowed!” Staff from the 2222 chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers dropped by on pickup trucks with snacks to fuel the strikers, some of them retirees, who moved in shifts up and down the sidewalks.

“Most of these people, they’re staying out here in the sun for 10-12 hours,” said Paul English, chief steward for the IBEW 2222, outside the Boston Street center last Friday.

“We want to get the strike done as quickly as possible, but we’ll be here as long as it takes.” It didn’t take long after he spoke; the stoppage was called off on Saturday morning when organizers from the IBEW and the Communication Workers of America agreed to go back to the table with their employers under the current contract and resume talks about a new one.