Follow along A different story Follow along The vault today. Who do you call when the phone stops working?A sort of Register The reader revealed everything.
We go back to the story of “Frank” (obviously not his name) in the 1990s. When all of his company’s phones went down, he found himself dealing with a problem. Of course, this means that the On Call call is quiet. It’s too quiet.
The company has its own PABX (dedicated automatic branch exchange), which allows users to call each other and, most importantly, to make calls to the outside world. Except for some reason, the phone in the morning ran out of power.
“In those days,” Frank explained, “this meant that the company no longer existed. There was no e-mail aside from internal e-mail.”
Although no one could directly call for help, Frank’s team immediately launched an investigation. It took half a day. During this period, those who were used to soldering mobile phones on the side of their heads had to find other seemingly important ways (no doubt through the bulky mobile phones at the time), but finally found the problem.
“The problem we discovered after half a day is…” Frank said, pausing for a while (no, no, dun), “The protocol printer used to print all calls and the costs incurred has run out of paper.”
A pleasant low-tech issue, it took a while for the team to understand it, because frankly, the way the account is tracked and the importance of printers are not yet fully understood. Someone used the phone, the phone was recorded, and the cost was printed out by the printer. However, if the log cannot be printed, then the designers of PABX have decided that it is best not to allow anyone to use the phone at all.
Put some more paper, everyone is happy. Kind of.
There is a flaw in the system, and Frank discovered a flaw by accident. When he checked the printout of the recovered printer, he did not find a record of his phone activity. Even if a particularly expensive call was made (he did not elaborate), there was no record.
It turns out that if the paper runs out, PABX will stop working for all phones, but in reality it will only pay for the printing of the company’s first 100 phones (expensive upgrades are required to do this). More than the first 100 phones can still work (assuming that the printer is not dropped). But there will be no guilty printouts. Frank’s cell phone is one of more than 100 lucky phones.
“However, I have always kept myself secret.”
After all, no one wants to walk to Pac-Man’s office in shame.
Have you solved a problem, but found another problem that you are very, very silent? Or call for support without a phone or email? Send an email to On Call to tell us all this. ®
*Unable to service user phone at all
