Answering the Call

Most people take the ability to place and receive phone calls reliably for granted. We assume that service should just always work, in our homes, offices, and on the road. So, when service is interrupted, we get annoyed and even angry. It is hard to imagine life before telephones. The pace at which people and businesses move these days could not be maintained without continuous connectivity via phones, mobile devices, computers, etc.
Last week, our landline phone provider, AT&T, experienced a massive system failure that took down our phone service at all three of our branches. As the CTO, my first thought was to start troubleshooting the outage from inside our office walls, but I quickly realized there was nothing I could do to restore service, and that while I was at the mercy of AT&T to fix their problem, the only action I could take was to re-route all of the calls to our main branch numbers to my cell phone!
Now, I don’t normally answer the phone here. In fact, when it rings after hours when I am staying late to work on a system upgrade, my palms start to sweat and I debate letting it go to voicemail for fear of not knowing how to respond to a request for EMT or some obscure fixture component. But for the next 5 hours I sat glued to my chair in front of my laptop fielding as many as 3 calls at a time on my mobile. During that time, I did my best to quickly explain that our land lines were down but that I was able to get email messages to staff who would return calls from their cell phones asap. A few callers were downright angry that I couldn’t transfer them, some gave me brief but urgent messages to pass along, but most of the people I spoke with were just grateful to get through.
I was actually surprised how understanding most callers were.
While I wouldn’t wish the stress of a phone outage on anyone, it was a fascinating learning experience for me to get to talk to the customers directly, hear the kinds of questions they ask, get a feel for which employees get lots of direct calls, and to watch our staff come together to service our customers under challenging circumstances.