I think the problem was in the last line of your querywhere you used "dept_id" and "phoneType_id". Those are probably integer values, not text. Here's my proposed fix:
select e.emp_id, e.lname from
Employee e join contactInfo c on e.emp_id = c.emp_id
join phones p on c.contid = p.cont_id
join phonetype pt on pt.phoneType_id = p.phoneType_id
join Department d on d.dept_id = e.dept_id
where d.type = 'tech' and pt.type = 'W'