Yesterday due to Health & Safety bureaucrats, the Inmates at the Insane Asylum all got a day pass out into the wild. Basically the overhead power cables in the Village where the Asylum is located were two inches lower than the regulations. I believe a circus stilt-walker standing on the back of an elephant could possibly electrocute themselves, so health & safety said the lines needed raising which meant a village wide power outage from 8am till 5pm.
Now the Asylum is an ISP & Telecommunications Provider & etc. So making allowances for the inmates to work from home should be no problem, especially as we had a weeks notice. The night before the planed outage we redirect our emails to a backup server, and take our phones home to connect to our Virtual PBX (which is a product we sell, so know works). So we should all have been sorted.
“The best laid plans of mice and IT professionals”
Now the Governor and our Phone Tec both have already got phones set up on the virtual PBX for testing purposes, so it was just the rest of the Inmates who needed to get online with it. Now Demonpengu tried setting his phone up the afternoon before the outage, and it took several hours to get it to actually connect. The rest of us waited until the day of the outage, where only I got my phone to connect. “Great so far right?”
After a hour or so a call locked up my phone, preventing incoming or outgoing calls. When the problem was spotted and fixed we discovered internal calls would result in only one phone being heard the other was just silence. And as for actual call quality, I could not hear the customer over hearing myself saying what I had just said. (And this is a product we sell)
For the last part of the day it was just me manning all the lines & support box, Pure madness & poor planning. I think next time I shall go the way of the others and just pretend my phone would not connect.
