Phone, again.

My office phone had been out since around the first of the month. The first thing I was told was that the last round of thunderstorms we had knocked out a few phones. Then I was told a trunk line (I didn't even know such things still existed) was out and I just needed to be patient.

Frankly, not having an office phone is only an annoyance when I needed to call someone -which wasn't often. My students knew that my phone was out, and so, e-mailed me or stopped by my office. And it was honestly sort of nice not to have random interruptions happening while I tried to work.

But I decided I needed the phone back, maybe people like colleagues were trying to call me. So I found an online form to fill out and send to the appropriate office.

They sent someone over this morning. He was puzzled by the list of symptoms - no dial tone, but the phone still works when plugged into someone else's jack. The internet (which is a different system but the wiring is adjacent) was never out at all. I could still access my voice mail (from home or from a colleague's phone).

He tried calling my number, said it was ringing (except it obviously wasn't, you know, ringing IN MY OFFICE). He called up the person in charge to see what was going on, then had to go and talk to the person in person (apparently they didn't believe that (a) there was supposed to be a phone assigned to me or (b) that my phone was actually not working.)

(I will admit at that point I got a bit worried..."They've reassigned my phone number? Do they know something I don't know yet? I'm on the list to be teaching this fall....")

Turns out in the reconfiguration that happened after the "trunk line" got fried was that my number was MISTAKENLY reassigned to an (apparently) empty office in a building halfway across campus. So my number was ringing, but no one was there to hear it. (Which doesn't really raise a philosophical question in this era of voice-mail: if the phone rings, and there's no one there to hear it, the caller just gets shunted into an automated system).

The guy managed to get the number correctly reassigned in about 20 seconds once the "they" believed his story.

So I have a working phone again though I admit I'm not going to be super-quick about telling people about it.