TC the Terrible

Lock your keyboards up kiddies. The idiots are using e-mail again.

No, not the usual idiots. The idiots at one of our ‘branch’ offices are the ones that I’m talking about. Some knuckle dragger down in Puerto Rico pushed out a “Have a Nice Day” e-mail (in Spanglish with a 40 meg PowerPoint attachment) to every damned user on our e-mail system. Since we have about 40K or so users that’s a pretty damn big “Oops” even for a Monday.

Now comes the good part. When I left the office at 5:30 I had deleted no less than 100 e-mails asking to be taken off the original sender’s mailing list. There were at least 30 more telling the 100 not to hit “Reply All” to junk mail. I love the irony in that last one.
Some days I think that there should be a national e-mail literacy test. If you flunk it all you are allowed to use is the fax machine, because no one still uses those.

The phone gods still hate me. Only now it’s worse.

My phone is functional again AND my voice mail is working. Working too well in fact. I noticed that my phone was lighting up again so being the dumbass that I am I picked it up to check my voice mail. Every message that I have deleted for the past six months has made it’s way back to my inbox. I’m at over a hundred messages right now.

The amazing thing is that two of the messages were from our phone repair tech. He was nice enough to call and tell me that all the phones on a certain trunk in the building were down. Like that information is going to make me feel better — when I CAN’T LISTEN TO THE DAMNED MESSAGE!!!

Geez, we hire some real brain surgeons around this place.

But I’m thinking that may be a good thing. My voice mail was hammered this morning when I got to my desk, but that was a system wide problem. During lunch I noticed that the clock on my phone needed to be reset. Lo and behold, the whole damned thing was down. I don’t have a dial tone so I can’t make calls, and when outside lines call me all they get is a busy signal.

So, of course I called the Help Desk. The conversation went like this:

Help Desk Dude (HDD) – Do you have a problem?

Me - Yeah, my phone is toast.

HDD - The voicemail system is down right now.

Me - I know that. My phone won’t call out and I can’t receive calls.

HDD - Are you sure? Because this call sounds fine to me.

Me - I’m calling you from another cube.

HDD - Oh. Ok, that was a good idea.

Me - Thanks. Can you get mine fixed?

HDD - Are you in cube GW163?

Me - No, I’m in GW161.

HDD - The caller ID says you are in 163.

Me - I told you. My phone doesn’t work and I’m calling you from a co-worker’s cube.

HDD - Oh. Ok, you should have said that sooner. I’ll create a ticket for your problem and the telecon guys will call you later.

Me - How are they going to call me?

HDD - Right. It may be a couple of days before they come over to your building again. You might want to give people your cell number so they can call you on that.

Me - No thanks. Just get them over here.

Anyone want to start an over/under pool on how long it takes to get my phone working again?