Coincidence… or Conspiracy!
I just wanted to share a rather surreal experience I had this morning. As will be usual when I post one of these stories, details are obscured to protect the privacy of those involved.
I was returning to my desk from a meeting this morning, when one of my employees whose shift had just ended informed me of a call he’d taken while I was away. Apparently the client called regarding a phone problem – he couldn’t make phone calls – and wanted to speak to someone about it.
Phone issues are not usually my department, but the sensible thing to do is get in touch with the client and get a better feel for what’s going on. I spent a few minutes looking up the client and find out he’s a retired faculty member, and although his title is “Professor of (one of the humanities)†his department is listed as “(one of the sciences)†- first bit of weirdness.
I call the guy, and he starts off reasonably enough – on Monday he was unable to check his email. Ok, fair enough, my problem. He keeps talking and reveals that he was unable to dial-in at all – which explains why he couldn’t get email. Reasonable, and the ball is still in my court. Then it gets strange.
He becomes heated at this point, and explains he missed several important phone calls on Monday, because his phone wasn’t working, although it works fine now. Ok – stop. So, he can’t dial-in, because his phone isn’t working. That makes sense, then, but his phone service isn’t something I can fix – he needs to talk to the local telecom company. At this point I tell him that he should get in touch with the local phone company, since the root of the problem was that his phone service was malfunctioning Monday.
He contradicts me. “No, it’s your problem. It’s your Emergency Notification system. You were testing that on Monday and it broke my phone.†Wait, what?
For those of you just tuning in, on Monday we tested our brand new Emergency Notification system. Essentially, it allows anyone who has voluntarily put their phone numbers into the system to be sent emergency notification by the University if some poor fool goes off his meds and tries to rack up a new high score. Widespread e-panic – at the speed of light!
I received test messages from the system on my work-provided phone as well as my personal phone, and they were pretty innocuous, “This is a test†sort of message. However, the client I’m speaking with is absolutely convinced that somehow this has broken his phone service.
I try to explain to him that his phone service is through the local phone company, and our system has absolutely nothing to do with the phone company’s service, and that if he’s having a problem with his phone service, the phone company is the organization to call, but he wasn’t having any of it. Sensing he was getting nowhere, he declared that he was going to get in touch with the person in the Communications department who initially sent the notice that the Emergency Notification system was going to be tested on Monday, and complain to him. After the client hung up, I sent the Communications guy a heads-up, warning him that he might get a call…
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
1) the entry of phone numbers was not entirely voluntary, many faculty and staff had their phone numbers copied from unrelated directories.
2) robocalling probably can produce fucked up results like this given a combination of crappy robodialers in india and crappy local telco exchanges it just might be possible that the robodialer left the exchange in a stuck state
Still this is not your problem it is the problem of borked telco (they all are) and a rent-a-cop force with only half a clue.