It's Not Worth Having a Stroke Over

Assume you're the overworked, underpaid, and totally disrespected I.T. guy at your company for a minute. Someone has just told you:

"Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone."

What would you do?

I called Verizon and, using the automated system changed his number. This was to happen two days later at the beginning of the billing cycle.

I let Brandon know this was happening, as well as the new number assigned to his device. So far, so good.

Two days later I arrived at work to find five emails (the first one timestamped 5:45 am), and several panicked voicemails from Brandon. His phone is dead. He's heading to the airport in 45 minutes to meet one of our directors, and she has no way of getting in touch with him.

It turns out that he needed to do the *228 thing for his phone to be reprogrammed with the new phone—a little bit of information that the Verizon automated system failed to give me.

Once he did that all was well.

The following day, I got an email from Brandon asking if I could have his old number forwarded to the new one. "I've had that number for the last ten years and all my contacts know it."

Of course, when dialing that number now all they got was, "This number has been disconnected."

I told him I didn't think that could be done. We gave up that number when we transferred it.

Bzzzzzzt! WRONG answer!

In other words, "I don't understand the meaning of the word No," which has pretty much been the attitude of anyone in management regarding technology since I started doing this support crap.

Well, Brandon rattled some cages and soon the CEO's admin assistant was standing at my cube telling me she knew how to do it. "I used to do it at the law firm all the time."

Against my better judgment—because I had other fires burning just as hotly that needed attending to—I let her take care of it.

The day went from bad to worse. The admin assistant brought me back into the process at several times because she didn't have the authority to make changes on the account, and the moment I heard the Verizon rep say "deactivate white iPhone" I knew we were in trouble.  I told the rep to stop the process and that we would be back in touch once everything was sorted out. Short version: the admin managed to get the CFO's brand new iPhone disconnected (which I had just delivered that morning) and Barry's old number reassigned to the CFO's old Blackberry.

We have 20 cell phone lines on our account. All of them are in use. What the admin assistant couldn't understand was that in order to reactivate the old number (and retain the new one) one of those other phones would have to be disconnected—which we couldn't do. "They put the old number back on the account. We just have to go down to the Verizon store and get a new sim card, right?"

I got on the phone with Verizon several minutes later, this time speaking to someone for whom English wasn't her second language, and explained the situation. She told me she could get the now-disconnected iPhone reconnected back to its original number and would then disconnect Brandon's original number.

The bottom line was the company needed to add a line in order to have Brandon's old number automatically forward to his new one.

Jeezus.

The Verizon rep told me it would take about 30 minutes to get this sorted out, and since I was already on overtime and at this point wanted to go home and get as far away from this bullshit as possible, I told her to just take care of it overnight and leave me a voicemail when it's sorted. I emailed all the interested parties in this drama and told them it would be fixed by morning.

Two fatal errors occurred in this process, one that I refuse to own, and one I will take responsibility for:

1. No one bothered to tell me that his old number needed to remain active. If they had, I could've advised them that we needed to add another line.

2. I should never have let the admin assistant get involved.

I arrived at work this morning to find a voicemail from Verizon saying that everything had been sorted out.  The white iPhone had its original number restored, and that Brandon's old number had once again been disconnected. I checked the iPhone and it was working fine. I returned it to a very happy CFO as soon as she got into the office and even provided a little Apple training while I was there.

After receiving approval from the COO to add another line to our account, I called Verizon sales and—after explaining this whole sordid mess—added the line and arranged to have Brandon's old number assigned to it.  We paired it with the CFO's old Blackberry that the iPhone had replaced—correctly this time—and it worked. I set up call forwarding, tested it, and all was right in the world again.

Or, apparently not.

I got called into my boss's office this afternoon and was told I had "an attitude problem" whilst trying to get this resolved. I'll admit I was flustered, and more than a little pissed off that the admin assistant had so totally screwed things up, but somehow it was all my fault that that this happened because I (as the CEO told my boss) hadn't considered the "business consequences" and the "potential loss of thousands of dollars" because the number had been changed without anything being put in place in regards to the old number.

Please. "Thousands of dollars?" Dude have you been smoking? Never mind. This is Colorado. I already know the answer.

I'm sorry. I'm not a mind reader. I did what I was told: "Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone."

I was so angry when I left work today I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I'm calmed down now (lots of hugs and snuggles from my Bubba when I got home helped), but one thing is abundantly clear: I know is that this job and the petty egos there are not worth having a stroke over.

After we get moved, I'm looking for a new job—in earnest. I've had enough of this batshit and am ready to be done with it. For all the complaining I did about my last job in Phoenix, it was never this bad, and now I can easily understand why my former boss at my current company walked last April.

It's funny, but with all the preparations for moving, I realized the other day that in the past whenever I've moved to a new city, my initial living arrangement—and initial job—seldom lasted more than a year. The upside to that is the second of each of those two items have always turned out great.