Saturday, September 29, 2007

Yep, I'm the phone guy too - and I work Saturdays


In small companies, everyone assumes that the IT guy takes care of anything that uses electricity, even the phone system and everything associated with it. I don't mind. For the most part phone stuff is easy to handle. If it gets too complicated I call our phone vendor - the company that sold us the system. We don't have too many adds, moves and changes and the voice mail system is the same one I have used for the last twelve years through four companies.

I received an email this morning for one of our Saturday crew that staffs the charter scheduling desk. "Hey, Tim - I moved desks today so I decided to move my phone too." Uh, why would you do that - never mind. "So I plugged it in and it doesn't work. What did you do?" I kid you not. As if I did something to cause his phone to not work from 50 miles away. When I asked him what desk he moved to I remembered that the previous occupant of that desk had complained of a similar problem a few months back, right after a coffee spill.

He probably thought I was crazy when I told him to pull up the floor mat, unscrew the floor plate covering the phone and computer jacks and carefully pull all the wires out as far as he can without disconnecting anything. He emails back, "Hey, it's all wet under there. Could that be why the phone doesn't work?" Ya think? I'll bet somebody spilled another coke or cup of coffee on that floor mat and adjoining carpet area which seeped down into the floor jack for the phone.

So we air it out and things seem to work normal after awhile. I'll probably have to put in some new wiring when I get back into the office on Monday. This is the same guy who complains that I try to block his personal Mac from using our wireless network just because I don't like Macs. I don't dislike Macs - it's just that I'm a Microsoft guy and 95% of the rest of the world is too. He's also notorious for kidding me about the fact that we track all the web sites our users visit. I get nothing but abuse from some users. That's OK. It's all part of the job.

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