Thursday, May 12, 2005

New cell phone

People who work in IT often have to work long hours, do late-night deployments, and that type of thing.

But people who work in Support are worse off then most IT people. They often have to be on call 24/7, because if things go wrong with the computer systems, they have to be ready to fix them at a moment's notice. For some systems, you can just leave it until the morning, but other systems are more critical, and have to be fixed right away. If the mainframe at your bank has a problem, the Support people need to be working on that thing immediately.

Why do I bring this up? Well, you see, I just got a new cell phone at work. Or rather, it's not a new phone - it's a phone which used to belong to someone else. It is a phone, in fact, which used to belong to someone who was on support.

So, every once in a while, I get a wrong number, from someone who is looking for the previous owner. This is fine. It's to be expected.

Unfortunately, some of those calls come at 3:00 in the morning, waking my wife, who then has to wake me up to tell me that the phone is ringing, because I never hear it myself. And of course I miss the call, so I have to wait until the voice mail comes through, after which I get the message, and call the person back, letting them know that I'm not the person they're looking for, and neither is my cell phone the one they wanted to call.

By this time, it's usually hard to get back to sleep.

Of course, like many of the problems in my life, this isn't really anyone's fault. It's just the way it is.

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