A quiet time ensued
At some point during the night, a small electrical mishap removed our office from the telephonic world. When I arrived at work this morning, and pushed my desk and worktable back into place from heating system repairs done yesterday evening, I checked my phone display for messages and found it out of order. What did I push back into the wrong place? No, looks OK… and the other phones in our department are also out… and across the hall. Someone else gave me the head’s up that it was going to be our Friday secret.
Fat chance. Our office depends on phone service; we have over six hundred employees spread out in an area larger than Texas, so someone is talking to somewhere, sometime, all the time. The phones haven’t been this quiet since sometime last summer. People couldn’t even phone each other, so the social calls had to be at the other’s desk (try to keep that discrete).
Two people went from desk to desk and made a list of what wasn’t working, well in advance of the arrival of a Bell tech.
Meanwhile, I got word that the UPS (think battery pack) was also showing signs of electrical distress. After lugging the fifty kilograms of battery pack back to my desk, I started on the repair request. Several phone calls, the excellent phone technique of someone named Aisha; “Are there any lights on? Turn it off. Any lights on? Turn it on. Any lights on?” we determined that the unit wasn’t working and should be returned to their service depot. Without the batteries.
I found a big enough box, and some layers of padding, and we went to the mailroom and weighed it, and the mail delivery guy asked if he should wait for it, but no, it wasn’t urgent, and with some more layers of heavy tape and several photocopies of the RMA document, the box was no longer my worry.
And now, it’s the weekend. A quiet time has finally ensued.
