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Where Has Your Cell Phone Been?
"Incident 1: A group of us were standing around the front desk after a meeting. The VP walks up (management are supplied with phones as well in case client calls get escalated) and someone says, 'I tried calling you last night but you weren't answering your cell phone.' The VP replies 'Yeah, my dog ate it!' Everyone laughed thinking it was a modern day take on the 'my dog ate my homework' story. Everyone laughed even harder when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag full of small pieces of electronics and black plastic, handed it to the administrative assistant at the desk and said 'Please order me a new one.' His German Shepard saw the phone sitting on the coffee table and thought it would make a good chew toy.
Incident 2: While waiting for an important call from a client, one of the support guys was carrying the cell phone with him absolutely everywhere. The team leader knew this, and while he was on the phone with another client (on a speakerphone), he was surprised to see this support person come rushing into his cubicle without the cell phone. The team leader looked curiously at the support guy wondering what was going on and got a mumbled response:
'I flmsdd shll fdn dbn tlt.'
'You what?'
'I flushed the cell phone down the toilet!'
A burst of laughter came from the other end of the speakerphone, and the client says 'I think I'll call back later, it sounds like you've got your own problems.'
'How the h**l did you flush the cell phone down the toilet?', the team leader continues.
'Well, I was waiting for that important call to come in, and I had to go to the bathroom so I took the phone with me. When I finished, I stood up and flushed the toilet and heard a "plop". Looking down all I could see was the phone (a StarTac) swirling lower and lower in the bowl, then it was gone.'
The burst of laughter from the surrounding people was nothing compared to the laughter a few minutes later when the support person was crouched with his head over the toilet listening for the phone while the team leader dialed the number. Not being able to hear anything they counted the phone lost, and put in a requisition for a new one.
A couple of weeks later, no one was really surprised when a plumber had to be called in because one of the toilets kept backing up. Half an hour later the plumber left, leaving a tightly sealed bag containing a now black and brown cell phone at the front desk. The phone was proudly(?) displayed in the support person's office for several weeks afterward until one extremely brave co-worker took the phone home, and after a very thorough drying, cleaning and sterilization, replaced the battery and brought the once again working phone back to the office! . . . of course everyone still refused to use it."
has to share a cell phone? I was kind of with you when you talked about tech people, but a company where a VP has to share a phone is... well, let's just hope your check clears next week.
I was working for a company in DC at the time, and we had an "EOC" phone. Engineer on call got passed the phone and had to keep it for a week. We were a 24-7 shop so no matter what shift you worked, you'd get your turn in hell. It was the worst for the monday-friday guys that worked the 4-12 shift because they'd invariably forget they couldn't get loaded on friday and expect to do anything useful early saturday morning. Of course that's when the call would come. 6 or 7am saturday morning. So I had it worse than any of these guys because as their manager, I had to be at work every single day for about 14 hours because I had inherited a HUGE mess from the previous tech manager (two months of redhat and he was a UNIX expert). Against the wishes of just about everyone, someone had put new code into production on a friday. Of course it bombed and completely hosed the backup system, as well as push the load on a very important machine to the point that it was completely unresponsive. So I'm doing my usual drive to work at 6am heading around the beltway. I get a phonecall and I can see it's the EOC phone. I flip the startac open and it's our pissed off, still half drunk EOC telling me that he needs me to put the fear of God into a support guy that refuses to try to use a serial cable to console into the sick machine. So we do a conference call. My EOC is completely pissed and just keeps getting worse. The support guy is complaining that he doesn't understand, and that he can't get ahold of his boss for permission. I explain that it's critical. The EOC is saying that he's driving in and about 30 minutes away and it would be great if he only had to deal with fixing the backups and how important it was to have this customer visible machine back up and running as soon as possible. I'm echoing what the EOC is saying and thinking to myself, yanno, I'm only about 30 minutes away. The EOC keeps getting more and more pissed. About this time a car speeds by me in the outside lane and that's when I hear the crackle on the line and pieces of nokia rain down all over my car. I probably would have been a huge dick about it if I hadn't been listening to the call.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
So lets see , there's been phones:
- Run over by 290 ton dump trucks. Phone? What phone?
- Dropped into various parts of an operating washplant (all ending with at least a 12 inch inlet impellor pump running at 2000RPM waiting for the phone)
- Dropped down 70 meter boreholes and then subsequently blasted to bits when said boreholes are charged with explosive and fired. (From memory in this case, they dropped about a cubic metre of dirt back down the hole to seperate phone from explosive before charging the hole.)
Try explaining *those* accidents to your boss.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.