Bumping the problem up a level
I have a little story to tell you, with a happy ending. It involves my workplace phone system, although I can’t name the company that supplies us. (For those of you saying “Tell us!”, I can’t.) Anyhow, we have about 500 users, and the whole thing is a huge computer programming nightmare. The control screens are reminiscent of tax forms, if that helps build an image.
Some of our employees are nomadic, and the phone system allows them to “log in” to a particular telephone handset for the day. Next morning, new place, new login. That’s the ideal. For some reason, one employee has consistently been able to log in, but never log out. Cue “Hotel California” and sigh in unison.
I have tried to find out the “why”, from time to time. Finally, I threw the problem over to the technical support team at the the phone company, figuring that they might understand their particular version of “Interface Hell”. And after spending one whole day, three technicians did find the answer. An unchecked option box, several screens down, that only appeared when the user was logged in and moved on beyond the “forced logout time”; we have that feature, but for this user, it didn’t work.
I’m glad the problem has been solved. Do I have regrets that I didn’t find the answer? No. Not at all. Life is too short for problems like that. I’d rather concentrate on why my home network isn’t configured to optimize speed and bandwidth. And that problem is much closer to a solution than it was, a short twenty-four hours ago.
