Phone Troubles and Spam
I admit to being completely befuddled by telephone extensions on most corporate phone systems. At both my previous job and my new one, the system has been: you dial 5 digits to reach someone internally, or 9 + a regular phone number to call external numbers.
But at my last job, depending on which line you were using on the phone, you had to dial either 5 or 6 digits. I admit that sometimes I just hit 9 and dialed the person’s full phone number, even if they sat two cubes away. I like to think it’s just one of those things I never took the time to learn rather than something I couldn’t fully comprehend.
In other news, for some reason, my return to the blog was accompanied by a tremendous surfeit of new comment spam. All I did was change servers (and the necessary DNS settings) and install a new template. Apparently the spambots noticed the new layout and thought they’d try again. Fortunately, nobody made it past my spam bucket, so there wasn’t any visible pollution. But I may have been overzealous in my deleting, so if you left a comment in the last few days and it never appeared on the post, well… my apologies.
March 28th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Yeah, we just had some fun at work. We’re on a new phone system and if you dialed a number in your same area code, but still considered long distance the system would tell you to you needed a ‘1′ plus the area code. If you added that to the number and tried again, Bellsouth would tell you to not include the ‘1′ plus the area code. I actually thought it was kidna funny, but it turns out (part of the problem) was North GA is going to mandatory 10-digit dialing on April 3rd and somehow this affected our line configuation.
As for extensions on our new system, every employee has 6-4 digit extensions: direct, fax, intercom, paging, forward to cell, and a “ghost extension” that nobody knows what it does. Welcome to IP telephony - sometimes I think there is a such thing as too much flexibility.