This is not a nuisance call
Time for a break in routine; how about calling 911, fifteen times in a row?
I did, and I did it for the “right reason”. Remember how I’m the designated telephone caregiver for my corporation? You didn’t? Doesn’t matter; I am, for better or worse. And after an incident, last week, where one of our schools called 911 and it rang into a different city, the word came down: investigate, and fix. The sequence might have been different, but I’ve been in this game long enough to apply a modicum of logical process.
Now, in order to call the magic number (that many times), I had to pretend that I was somewhere else. Hours away, if you will. And in the magical world of VOIP, there’s a way. We have our own telephony servers, so all I needed to do was reconfigure a single handset, over and over again, to different extension numbers. Numbers that “belong” to specific addresses.
Conceive a process, apply, profit. The whole game took a couple of hours, and I started to recognize voices in different call centers (we have cities with more than one institution). Invariably, the personnel were professional and polite. One exception.
In a small, but self important municipality, my first call was met with the warning that making “test calls to the magic number” was not allowed. Permission must be granted. And so I thanked the operator, hung up and called the “Bureau of Municipal Security”. A familiar voice; given we’d just spoken less than a minute ago. Yes, I could test, but I should have requested permission long in advance. Thanked him for his efficiency, hung up and called 911; that same voice answered, for a third time. This might be a one stop shop, in a one horse town…
But, before lunch, my tests were complete. If this had been a real emergency, it might have been different.
