Breaking New Ground with a Twig

About a week ago at work, they upgraded the phone system. They expanded the call center by increasing the number of lines going into the call center – and everywhere else in the company.

Yesterday, our telephones were dead. We could make internal calls, but no one could call in and we couldn’t call out to the world.

Our operations department informed us that they knew about the problem and were working on it with the telephone companies involved.

This was annoying at first, but then became a real problem whenever I tried to do any of the simple things I typically do in a day.

I had to use my personal cell phone for most of the day – though I’m sure the company will compensate me for my cost.

The real problem occurred around 3:00pm – we had a very important conference call and WebEx with managers of all the branches from across Canada. This conference call could not be re-scheduled, as it was announcing some important changes to the way we do business.

And – go figure – it is hard to have a conference call when you don’t have a phone line to do it on.

The phones went dead around 10:30 or 11:00am, and actually remained down until after 5:00pm – we went a whole business day without the basic necessity of being able to reach out and touch someone.

Might as well have had a twig to write notes in the sand. Or maybe we should have got some Styrofoam cups and string, and created our own working version of a telephone network.

I could see it now – papers everywhere as people trip over twine weaving and winding throughout the office. Others giggling as they listen in on personal calls. Spilled coffee everywhere, as people forget what the Styrofoam cups are for and they attempt to use them to actually drink from. . .

We did have our conference call and WebEx – though the solution wasn’t the best. Our IT guys are miracle workers, and they managed to find us an old analogue, cordless phone from which we took turns passing around, to participate in the conference call.

The phone – probably a good ten-years-old – had a fairly decent speaker, so we could hear everyone else on the call. Though when talking on it, you had to hold it several inches away from your face, so that you didn’t get blasted by the speaker.

Our Internet was not fully functional either – and so we had to make do with whatever jury-rigged solution IT gave us.

Whatever they did, it worked, but it was still embarrassing and awkward working for a company that couldn’t make a simple phone call.

Technology fails, that’s just a part of life. But to be without the most basic of technologies for an entire business day is mind-numbing. And a telephone is pretty basic – almost everyone has a phone, some have three or more of them.

Maybe next time technology fails, I’ll go for a nice long walk. So far, the sky has never fallen. Yet.