sense: command not found

A little bit of common sense is all I ask.

Really.

Today I have a user whose phone has two lines, x1234 and x3456. He has one voicemail box: 1234. He complains to me that his second line has a blinking voicemail light, and he doesn't have the password to log into the voicemail system and check it.

This is unusual, since he should only have one voicemail box. But stranger things have happened than a user getting a legacy phone that was originally configured in 1996 by a lunatic. So I jot down his second extension and take it to the switch to find out some information about it.

"Voicemail box 3456: no such user" I never doubt the PBX switch, because the PBX switch is, by definition, never wrong. I don't care if you accidentally fat-fingered all your calls to be forwarded to yourself and caused a loop: the switch does what it's told and it's not its fault you told it to do something stupid.

So I return to the user and report that his second line does not have its own mail box, and this is how it should be. "Oh," he says. "Then what's that over there?" It's not sarcasm, he genuinely wants to know what the voicemail light is blinking. And it is blinking.

On a second phone.

On the other side of the room.

And he had no idea that this second phone wasn't magically tied to the little buttons on the phone on his desk. I have no idea what line of thinking would cause him to see the flashing voicemail light on some other phone, see that he has a second extension on his own phone, and conclude that the two must be one and the same.