Users Are What Make the Job Hard

I'm in a bit of a quagmire right now, so please, help me out and kill your telephone.

I say this because, once again, POTS-style telephones are trying to be the death of me. A week or two ago, I had a user who thought "it might be a modem problem" because of an old and unreliable phone wire.

This weekend, I had a bunch of users move into new offices: the corporate version of musical chairs. Sure enough, it's pretty easy to jump extensions around on an Option 11C: the MOV command is useful for homogenous transfers, and if you have to make an old extension ring a new kind of set, "CPY 1" is invaluable.

But the users? Man, alive, don't get me started about them. They must think that moving phones around is some sort of dark mojo that involves dark rituals and chicken entrails.

It is. But that's no reason to pester your resident shaman about every last detail of the process. I'm about ready to throttle one of the moving users because of her constant calls. I've gotten everything from "What will happen when people call my old number?" (WTF?) to "Can I keep my old phone?" to "When people call my boss, the call gets forwarded to me, what's wrong?"

That last one? Where her boss's calls get forwarded to her? Yeah. We call that "He turned on call forwarding". Not her fault, of course, but after I explain to her the concept, she relates to me the fact that he didn't even know it was on. Make that two people I'm ready to throttle.

And another thing....

I got a voicemail from a long-winded VP. He could have simplified his entire dissertation into "The new hire isn't getting his voicemail because the old extension we gave him is still being forwarded to So-and-so's voicemail. Please fix it." So I trudge down to the PBX switch and fix the voicemail SNAFU.

About an hour later, I get a call from Veep's secretary — the one who calls me every day — this time asking me in her heavily accented broken English to fix the exact same problem. I can't imagine that I didn't fix it, so I ask her, "Have you checked it lately?" She tells me "Well, this was just, like five minutes ago." I encourage her to test the new voicemail setup to see if it works. I still don't hear back from her after a long while, so I call her back later in the day. "How's the voicemail? Does it work?" Yes, everything seems fixed now. She thanks me and hangs up.

So when she said "five minutes ago", she meant that Veep decided to ask her to follow-up on his voicemail five minutes ago without bothering to tell her that she was just doing a follow-up — and I might already have fixed it — not a brand new trouble ticket, when it just sounds like I'm trying to evade the problem entirely.