![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
First real post - hope you'll forgive the only cursory-to-support nature.
At my job, if you want to call outside of the university you have to dial "9" first. I would hope that people would learn this fairly easily. And yet...
See, the problem is that my extension happens to be the same as the area code plus the number "7" - which correlates to every downtown number for my city. This means that I'm constantly getting people calling me by mistake. My favorite are the people who fuck this up with their fax machines set to auto redial. Then there are the people who misdial, realize their mistake before the phone finishes ringing once, hang up, and make the same mistake again. Rinse, repeat 2-3 times.
Seriously folks - if you can't figure out the telephone system, just stop using the phone.
At my job, if you want to call outside of the university you have to dial "9" first. I would hope that people would learn this fairly easily. And yet...
See, the problem is that my extension happens to be the same as the area code plus the number "7" - which correlates to every downtown number for my city. This means that I'm constantly getting people calling me by mistake. My favorite are the people who fuck this up with their fax machines set to auto redial. Then there are the people who misdial, realize their mistake before the phone finishes ringing once, hang up, and make the same mistake again. Rinse, repeat 2-3 times.
Seriously folks - if you can't figure out the telephone system, just stop using the phone.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 06:23 pm (UTC)After a few weeks of this, I set my outgoing voice mail message to "I'm just a lowly programmer here. If you need me, my cell phone is xxx-xxxx. If you reached me by accident, try leaving the first 777 off the number.", and then I turned off the ringer. And then once a week I'd listen to all the messages with requests to provision a switch in East Bum Fuck, people at the front security desk who didn't realize that the security desk's phone was on an internal line, or people complaining about their phone bills.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 06:58 pm (UTC)They had a messed up system setup with handling extensions. you could dial any of the following to get the extension in a classroom: Room Number (if it did not start with 1, 8, or 9), 1+Room Number, 9+Room Number and waiting 10 seconds for the system to give up waiting for you to continue dialing and assume you were trying to call an extension and hit 9 instead of 1 by mistake
All numbers starting with 8 were special case shortcuts to outside numbers 8+123 was my favorite (It was the local PBS station)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 06:39 pm (UTC)People really are stupid.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 06:51 pm (UTC)Caller: Hello, put me through to $DEPARTMENT.
Me: No.
Caller: Er.... Why not?
Me: Because you've been naughty! <click>
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 07:04 pm (UTC)Oh, I would sooooo love to do that :)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 07:07 pm (UTC)But because our phones made a series of sounds when dialing outside, that was different than dialing inside, most people realized their mistake before she ever picked up the phone. She just always got in the habit of letting it ring once or twice to see if it really was her they wanted to talk to!
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 08:00 pm (UTC)Me: "
Them: "Ummm... yes... uhhh... I need information regarding this traffic ticket."
Me: "WELL THEN YOU SHOULDN'T BE SPEEDING NOW SHOULD YOU?"
-------------------
Me: "
Stupid Woman: "I need to know why my son has been jailed."
Me: "WELL THEN YOU SHOULDN'T BE SPEEDING NOW SHOULD YOU?"
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 09:22 pm (UTC)"Yeah."
"...it's my first job. Why didn't anyone bother to tell me this?"
"Uhhh..."
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 10:22 pm (UTC)The town has a 442-xxxx and 443-xxxx prefixes.
442-xxxx was Pizza Hut. 443-xxxx was their number. They would answer the phone on friday nights with "Hello, Pizza Hut."
Then it was time to tell them that there were two and a half hour wait times because they were short staffed, their driver's car broke down, the kitchen caught fire, they were closed for the day because of food contamination, etc.
The meanest was when they would take the order and act like everything was okay.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 10:44 pm (UTC)b) I had a woman who didn't get that "dial 9 to get out" and would constantly try to fax things from inside the company to my extension... I got in the habit of transferring the fax machine call back to her extension whenever she'd do it... I figured if I had to hear the annoying whine and fuzz, so did she... I figured out who it was by redirecting the call to a fax program - and seeing who the 'sender' was.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-17 01:33 pm (UTC)When I get faxes from people, I usually wait for the second call and then fax them back a standard form letter saying to dial 9. Although there was the one guy who was spam-faxing from our phone system and always forgot to dial 9. I had Telecom pull his phone line for that one.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 11:42 pm (UTC)The other was when calling the tech guy of a company I was doing a training course at to remind him he was supposed to be attending a course. Turned out his number was one digit away from a porn line, and I was dialling him on the presentation equipment. Hee.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 11:11 am (UTC)From the moment we had it set up, I've let the helpdesk extension ring at least twice...