No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which each Friday we share your tales of fun and frolics at the frontline of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Warren" who worked for an US-based organization that operated several sites scattered across London, UK. Warren's job …
Yup, I have two phones. The company number is known, and that phone is polluted with the Windows excuses for mobile applications (which ought to get awards for worst UIs ever seen on a mobile platform, but I digress). It diverts calls to my personal phone, but that's something that *I* control, not the company. And I don't call back from my personal phone, obviously.
When I'm on leave, the forward is off. Simple. Only my boss has my personal number, and he and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to personal time - I think he's one of the better ones I had the pleasure to work with. Some of the cretins I worked for had this idea they someone bought themselves slave labour - that usually didn't last long as I'm quite, umm, clear in my communication in that respect, and it's the joy of a specialist profession that they need you a lot more than the other way around..
Do I read that correctly? Windows-Phone? Those still exist? Or is that the MS apps for 'droid? Those are... well.... quite par for the software quality coming out of Redmond in the last decade or so.
The Windows Phone UI was a pleasure to use, responsive, unobtrusive, quite plain. Unfortunately they had to ruin it.
No, he means Microsoft mobile apps. Like Outlook for mobile which is slower than a dehydrated slug, has a massive floating "New E-mail" button that obscures part of the message you're trying to read, and which randomly decides not to show you new e-mails because Intune is "syncing your policy" in the background. Of course, it doesnt tell you this, it just doesnt bother showing you that urgent email that arrived in your inbox 15 minutes ago...
I also love the randomness of when Outlook will actually show you your appointments. I've been caught away from my desk plenty of times and had a nagging feeling that I had a meeting coming up. Pop open Outlook, (wait a few minutes while it has a petit mal seizure), switch to the calendar view, see that my schedule is open for a while, feel good that I'm not missing anything, then open it up again later and see that my events updated, and I'm either late for or outright missed a meeting.
Slightly less broken, but more even annoying is Teams. When you turn on work mode (on Android) and Teams is able to check in, it decides to notify you about every teams message for the last few days, even though you've already responded on your desktop.
I have Outlook on my iPhone 10. I have to prod it lots periodically to get it to put up notifications. It is otherwise well behaved. Though Outlook generally assumes if someone sends me a message with a meeting in it then it MUST be one I MUST attend.
I work in a school, I’m not a teacher but I get a lot of teacher relevant emails (don’t ask me why). Lots of these have meetings in them . . .
BYOD is a terrible idea from both ends, full stop. It's in the employer's interests to ensure a strict separation of work from personal, it makes things far easier to administer, monitor and secure. It means a responsible employer can be 100% confident that their employees have everything required to do their job, without running the risk of the employee making perfectly legitimate claims for expenses if they're expected to use personal funds for work purposes without it being explicitly stated in their employment contract.
And from the employee's perspective, it keeps your employer's IT department out of your device, which in the worst cases, could require a factory reset to get their tendrils out if they're uncooperative. Not to mention the benefits of being able to switch off and put away your work phone and laptop when outside of office hours or on leave.
I agree, though I have so far been willing to let them send normal voice calls, SMS messages, or OTP codes to my personal device. Anything more than that and they can buy a device to do it. Their IT department gets no administration rights over any personal device whatsoever. Fortunately, I have never had that particular contact method abused by managers.
Agreed. The only work related app on my phone is an authenticator app to give me the necessary 6 digit code for the TFA system. And it is just a generic one, not the MS version that work want to push on me that has other, way too invasive, components in it. They have a mobile number for emergency use only, and when the authentication system has to send a txt. Thankfully, a dual SIM phone is all the separation I need.
I even refused that. Bought a Ubikey with my own $ and told them that was my authenticator and to program the system accordingly. I knew it would work, as my IT bod had done it and told me how to get corporate to approve it. Being on good terms with your IT people is a good idea.
...and when Windows authenticator borked itself on everyone's phones, I could still log on. I hear now that you have to authenticate, log in on your PC, the authenticate again in the other direction (or some such silliness)
Being uncooperative could, of course, be immediately wiping the employee's phone the second their employment ends. And if that was in the contract, then there's not much can be done about it. You can't really sue over losing a couple of thousand pictures of your cat sleeping, unfortunately.
It is if you let Microsoft set the standard for separation but with a bit of effort you can use roll your own FOSS, airwatch or backberry enterprise server and have all corporate apps in a sandbox that is administered by the work including a voip phone app and even use dual sim so staff can have a work sim if needed. This allows less e-waste, means that some staff can just BYOD, some can get a subsidy towards a better single device rather than two mediocre or sub par ones, and staff who have company phones with personal use allowed can have some privacy. It is alot more work than just enabling authenticator as 2fa byod setting a minimum security patch lever for droid and apple and requires an understanding of existing company policy or agreeing new policy in many areas. Hence most people don't bother to get it right, for a myriad of understandable reasons because the organization leadership don't agree they are responsible for setting this policy or the time frame to get this available at the behest of leadership is too tight or free open source software is not accepted and the budget does not cover a sufficiently capable solution. In many cases clarity on these policies, and solutions for these technical challenges would be beneficial even if BYOD is not pursued but I digress. Due to this common organizational dysfunction i often find myself forwarding calls from a superfluous corporate Samsung droid or apple device whilst I am under the yoke. These devices cost money and too often go to landfill when used for fear of data leakage .
As Ron Swanson and even Nick offerman in his stand up would say don't half a** two things whole a** one thing.
I have never been able to connect to the wifi at work despite following the instructions and being fairly technically competent. Android or iPhone. I have 10GB of data a month and never use it all so I just do not bother any more. It gets used for looking up chemical data on wikipedia during work time. I might scroll twitter during downtime. It plays music to a bluetooth speaker.
Exactly this. I remember a former mangler acquiring my personal cellphone number from the seemingly unprotected HR database. I found this out when I was getting texts at around 23:00 on a Saturday asking if I could come in two hours early on Monday for "voluntary" overtime. I was in the pub, a few pints in. It took some self-control to not reply telling him to fuck off (and his number got blocked on my phone).
When he asked if I had read the text messages I told him I hadn't received any and that he must have sent them to an incorrect number. Leaving that job was a relief.
In the new job I had a manager asked me about work-life balance and was I happy with mine. I replied that my work phone is turned off as I leave the building every day, and turned back on when I arrive the next morning. If the building burns to the ground overnight I won't know until I arrive in the car park. Thankfully he's of the same view!
"I replied that my work phone is turned off as I leave the building every day, and turned back on when I arrive the next morning."
My employer has my personal phone number. However I live in a place where we have the right to disconnect. If you're supposed to be on call and contactable by the company whenever, you're either high enough up the pecking order that your salary justifies this sort of thing, or you're paid to be contactable. Otherwise, work time is work time and home time is home time.
Sixteen years and they only called once, when I didn't show up. Told my boss I spent the night puking and had an appointment to see my doctor and I had actually said all of that to her answering service...which she hadn't yet checked.
"unprotected HR database"
These days, these parts, that would be an immediate GDPR fail. And unlike Britain's useless ICO, the CNIL likes to bite.
"If you're supposed to be on call and contactable by the company whenever, you're either high enough up the pecking order that your salary justifies this sort of thing, or you're paid to be contactable."
Or it's just expected, which might switch from reasonable to not reasonable very quickly. I've had several jobs where I could theoretically be on call any time of the day or night, and they did not run this by me beforehand, but so far, these have not actually called me in in the middle of the night so I've not complained.
Also, the HR database wouldn't be an automatic GDPR fail depending on what "unprotected" means. If it means that they didn't bother to have any access controls or to encrypt the data, yes, that's a GDPR problem. However, neither of those are necessary for your manager to use it to get your phone number, as that is data they would normally have a legitimate reason to access, for example if they need to contact you because you haven't been online for some time. It would be very difficult to make that a GDPR issue, as the problem is their abuse of the number, not their access to it in the first place.
Yes, it does, but in very general terms. Selling that number, even though they have a legitimate reason to have it, would be a GDPR issue. Giving it to every colleague of yours might be an issue but might not reach the bar. Using that number to let your manager call you when you are an employee is exactly why they have it. GDPR is not specific enough to distinguish excessive contact from normal contact and is the wrong law to try to use in that situation. For that, you will need something that explicitly defines it, such as a right to disconnect law if you have one or general employment law otherwise.
I applied for a job with Carphone Warehouse, phone # supplied. I didn’t even get an interview but a couple of months later I got a sales call from them and put 2 & 2 together. Invoked GDPR told they only had my details for a job application and they had better delete them from their sales list or I would escalate it.
I have not heard them since so they know they were being naughty.
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Some years ago, in a moment of sheer unmitigated madness, I allowed the company's Exchange server access to my personal mobile. NEVER EVER allow yourself to be persuaded to do this. Exchange immediately assumes ownership of your phone—at least all the parts that Exchange deems relevant to it's purposes. I irretrievably lost a number of personal contacts through that moment of foolishness, and it took several weeks of work to recover the rest of the 'damage', having first booted Exchange off the device.
"Was giving his employer his own personal cell phone number."
Suddenly I feel very old. I remember the days when there were no cell phones. There were pagers but not every organisation had those. There were land-lines and, due to the black telephone rationing office, getting a personal line was problem enough without getting a work line as well. When I got a job which might require a call-out, with it being a job with most call-out callss originating from a police liaison officer, we got our first land-line.
My father was on a contract providing technical support to the US Air Force. We moved to an area when there was a big buildup going on. My mother contacted to phone company to get line installed (this being the mid-1950s all there were was landlines). They told her "3 months." This was duly relay to my father when he got home. The next day, the phone company came to tell her the line would be installed in 3 *days*. Apparently on hearing about the 3 month delay, the base commander had a conversation with someone at the phone company. Said conversation apparently includuing things like "essential personnel" and "right NOW".
At a previous job, when I applied, I gave my personal number on HR paperwork at the application process (not having a work line at that moment).
Coworkers/etc got the number of the company supplied mobe.
HR then gave out my personal number to anyone who asked for it.
"We couldn't reach him on his vacation, do you have another number for him?"
I don't work there anymore thankfully.
If it was a secondary line I'd have considered that, but I'm not changing a number I've had for decades because someone gave it out.
The difficulty of contacting literally hundreds of people/places/institutions and updating it on about as many official forms/documents/accounts outweighs the annoyance of the occasional call from a prior place that I don't answer anyways.
GDPR wasn't a thing when this happened, but I did kindly state that I would selectively no-answer forward all calls from the people who were given my number to certain other numbers (theirs) if mine kept being given out. That seemed to do the trick.
HR tend to want a private number to go on your file for employment reasons.
That is supposed to be kept private.
It's not there for anyone else to access.
Some company HR departments don't understand this and will happily hand it over to anyone who asks. Changing jobs didn't help. Changing mobile provider complete with new mobile number did, though.
A company is going to need your contact info like home address and phone number. If for nothing else, because they need to reach you during the interview process, but if you stop showing up to work they're gonna want to have a way of reaching you to find out what's going on. If you don't have a landline, you're gonna have to give them your personal cell number. The mistake wasn't Warren's for giving it to them, it was the company's for publishing it where anyone could access it, and that "anyone" thinking it gave them the right to call it based on his job title and location.
The first time he had this issue he should have changed the number in the company's records. He could have called whichever HR drone manages that data and said that phone number was no longer valid and give them a made up number as the new one. Provided they still have his personal email and/or home address they'll still have a way of contacting him, just not one that's gonna wake him up at 3am.
Or the joys of Outlook and Entra, where it logs you out every hour (probably our corporate settings) so you stop getting notifications at all until you authenticate, hoping you were looking at the phone screen in the three seconds the MFA code was on display before it switches to MS Authenticator. And then you have to kill the app and reopen it for it to sync.
I think Warren did the right thing by giving out the bosses number, but this is why I refuse to give my personal number for work related matters or install work related apps on it.
As a former contractor I have two phones, one is my own number for people who know me to call and the other is a work number. That way I can leave the work phone at home when I go out for the day so that I don’t get bothered.
If someone wants me to be on call then they can supply and pay for a work phone which will get handed back when you leave the company.
I make sure my work number only works during work hours (I don't do any kind of out of hours support - although my team might call me there for urgent matters).
A former client tried getting my personal number from various people, even though I'd told him I wouldn't give it to him, until one day a colleague misguidedly gave it to him. He called me on that number and I told him, on no uncertain terms, that it was my private number, not intended for work, and that, if he needed to call me, to call the other number (which was off at the time) and I'd call him back whenever I could. And that I would never answer work calls on my personal number. That was the one and only time he tried that.
Skype used to have the option to only divert-on-no-reply to your mobile during office hours, so the moment out-of-office came on in Outlook the calls stopped.
Then along came Teams and bang goes that option!
(the only time I got a work call on my personal mobile was about a month after being made redundant/retiring... so I must have given it out 'for one time use only' at some point)
We compromise and use the pagerduty app - noone needs to have your phone number to be able to reach you.
As an engineer, I can mute PD and as a manager I can mute PD for my engineers.
If someone does page $person, the log shows who generated it and when. We're also very clear on what's a pageable situation (production down) and what isn't (basically everything else)
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I never had that problem as a consultant. I've always given out my personal number and other than two or three occasions over two decades, it has always been respected and I haven't been called unless it was mutually understood that I was "on call" off hours and that I would charge a minimum of an hour even for something that I can resolve with a couple sentences and almost immediately get back to sleep.
The last thing I'd ever want is a second phone to deal with. I'd ask them for an eSIM profile to load into my phone giving it a second number. When you're off work and not on call, you can simply switch off that second number and you won't get any calls or messages until you turned it on the next morning.
I work on Linux boxes (both my desktop and various compute servers and HPC systems), my missus works on Windows, my work uses Gmail and the like, my missus Outlook and all that MS stuff. I write my papers in LaTeX, she only uses MS-Word, etc. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but somehow, because I work at the Computer Science department she tends to think I am a spare help desk for her work. I have repeatedly explained I know nothing of Outlook, and studiously want to keep it that way. After a long day at work, I don't feel like sorting driver issues on her work laptop, or configuring her work print tool, of which I have zero knowledge.
My in-laws are similarly under the impression that I am able to solve any issue with their computer. Happily, my sons now mainly take care of their issues, and I find my in-laws are more inclined to listen to their grandchildren than to me.
> My in-laws are similarly under the impression that I am able to solve any issue with their computer.
A few years ago I built myself a PC. As my parents had just bought a Windows PC with Windows 8.0 on it so I put that on instead of Windows 7 - I guess that's a form of child abuse...
At some point I need to tell them that the PC (now on Win10) needs to be replaced due to MS ending its support next year - this will no doubt mean I'll be "working" over Christmas :)
My wife brings tea before the question! No windows questions, I made her get a Mac when she moved in, we're both happy. The question is usually "Is the internet slow on your computer?" And I reply over 100 tabs will slow everything down...
Pint as it's Friday, but a nice cuppa icon would accent the comment!
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He deserved them, obviously.
It is managerial duty to oversee that helpdesk contacts go where the appropriate resources are. This one failed to do his job.
I hope he liked getting woken up.
I'm also pretty sure that, after a day or two, he finally updated the helpdesk phone roster.
That said, I absolutely agree about personal/professional phone difference. My customers have my professional number, which is available from 8 to 19.
My personal number is none of their business.
>>which is available from 8 to 19.
Wow - you are generous!
My work number is off until the second my backside hits the desk chair at exactly (for given values of exactly) 0730, and then on until I lock the server room door at 1630 on the nail, 8 hours later. The boss has my personal number but she knows not to call me except in dire emergencies and only for things that will be a 30s conversation to fix or acknowledge that whatever appears to be broken is actually broken and will remain so until the next working day.
Oddly this is thanks to her boss who, in no uncertain terms, told me that I should be able to do my job within my contracted hours. Lucky him - he wants work to rule, he gets it. And lucky me, because work/life balance is much better!
I managed a team who supported the systems the developers used. They also answered the phone from our end users.
There were always a couple of user's who did not read emails, phoned the help desk, didn't follow the advice given,and threatened to "phone your manager".
I got the details of a couple of these people and phoned them back.
I was very sweet on them. I listened to their problems, and asked if they had seen the emails. yes they had, they didn't have time to read them etc. They said every one had the same problem, so it wasn't just them.
I then said they were clearly overworked, and so I'd speak to their manager about them being worked so hard, that they could not read urgent and important information. Also, as their manager was the one asking for this very important upgrade, I had better check with their manager about which request had higher priority. If every one has the same sort of problem, I'd speak to their manager to see how widespread the problem was.
Cue the sound of furious back peddling. The people suddenly realised that their manager was going to hear about this and their manager would take action!
These people stopped complaining, and when they did phone the helpdesk they were as sweet as pie.
My wife's boss once told somebody who treated his employees badly that only he had the right to shout at them, after all, he does pay them. Customers are free to shout at him (they pay him), at which point he might rethink doing business with them.
Note that he does not shout (as this is not the correct way to treat people).
"as this is not the correct way to treat people"
There are a few cases when it is appropriate, I saw somebody try to clear a jam from a still running industrial metal shredder by climbing into it and trying to dislodge the jam, the foreman spotted and hit the e-stop and then tore into the guy.
Another case of appropriate shouting was when some guy cut off a lockout tag and turn the breakers back on, this blew the main fuse as the sparky had also connected the live to earth as a secondary safety, the sparky had words to say to the moron who remove the tag.
In the second instance I would have ensured that 'guy' had already had the proper training concerning lockout tags ..... and then reported him to the police for attempted manslaughter.
In the first instance I would have provided 'guy' with a link to the Darwin Awards, and told him that he was not allowed to operate the shredder until he had finished reading.
----------> Seriously, the first guy would have had a good shouting about how suicidally stupid he was being. The second would be refered to H&S .... unless I was the electrician, in which case I would be tempted to apply a clue by four to the problem.
"In the second instance I would have ensured that 'guy' had already had the proper training concerning lockout tags ..... and then reported him to the police for attempted manslaughter."
I've never heard of attempted manslaughter before: Nearly but not quite managing to killing someone without intention or with diminished responsibility?
Joking aside, that would be closer to attempted murder as the idiot had to actively bypass a safety feature in order to put the other person's life at risk, so there was a degree of intent involved. So a dressing down (get shouted at) would be a very mind rebuke : Being fired (not sacked*) and any certification in that field revoked would be appropriate. Prosecution for reckless endangerment would also be on the cards.
First one... well, while it would be tempting to film what happened, the people who would need to watch it are the ones who are least likely to take any notice. Safer to simply fire them immediately.
* Bit of trivia: Being sacked referred to being handed your tools (in a sack) and told to go ply your trade elsewhere. Being fired referred to having your tools destroyed by fire so you couldn't continue working in that trade any longer without going back through apprenticeship to acquire the tools again.
"I've never heard of attempted manslaughter before: Nearly but not quite managing to killing someone without intention or with diminished responsibility?"
Quite a frequent charge. Usually a serious assault where there was not clear indication that actual murder was intended but could be a reckless act although I think normally with a sufficiently serious injury to show that death was a likely outcome. I doubt there'd be intent to kill, which would be the requirement for attempted murder.
* Bit of trivia: Being sacked referred to being handed your tools (in a sack) and told to go ply your trade elsewhere. Being fired referred to having your tools destroyed by fire so you couldn't continue working in that trade any longer without going back through apprenticeship to acquire the tools again.
That bit of trivia in and of itself deserves way more than the single upvote I can give you.
The English speaking world probably got "sacked" from the French (something like on luy a donné son sac) sometime in the 1600s.
Fired is a take on discharged, and probably American in origin, late 1870s.
Where used concurrently, the two terms were and are interchangeable.
> * Bit of trivia: Being sacked referred to being handed your tools (in a sack) and told to go ply your trade elsewhere. Being fired referred to having your tools destroyed by fire so you couldn't continue working in that trade any longer without going back through apprenticeship to acquire the tools again.
Amusing but unlikely.
According to Google n-gram viewer the phrase "fired from job" only started to be used in print in the US from 1922 onwards and in the UK from the mid 1960s onwards. That's far too recent to be something related to apprenticeships.
A synonym for "discharged" as Jake suggests is more likely.
"According to Google n-gram viewer the phrase "fired from job" only started to be used in print in the US from 1922 onwards"
My copy of the OED suggests that "fired" in the context is from the 1870s, starting to become common in print by the 1880s (with a couple examples). However, there is no definitive "first" example. My gut feeling is that, like many such things, it started life as (US) military slang and gradually entered the general language as people were mustered out.
Suggestion: Ignore go ogle for this kind of thing. They are very frequently incorrect.
I've never heard of attempted manslaughter before:
It might be a more recent legal development? I don't remember it from when I was reading law.
I don't know what kind of manslaughter can be attempted without intention, but I guess that manslaughter is a catch-all that includes some kind of edge cases.
Yeah seen these 2 numbnuts before... and yeah it was me doing the shouting (in the office .. with union rep/staff rep present) so loudly I got a complaint from QA that they could hear every detail of what I called them.
Along with attempting to bypass the safety cage around the robot because he'd dropped his rolly (a hand rolled cigarette)under the gate and opening the enclosure door on still running machinery(that one got very wet from my habit of having one coolant spray hose aimed at the door.....)
But now I leave that sort of thing to the PFY because she's much more calmer and chilled thant I could be.... plus if you piss her off enough she can scream louder than me :)
my habit of having one coolant spray hose aimed at the door
Cheeky. I like it.
In an even more prior job, I was opening the door to a horizontal machining cell to do some inspection/maintenance task, and unbeknownst to me the operators had bypassed the door switch.
Got a face-full of soluble oil coolant when the timed washdown started up, since the controller did not sense that the door was open.
Safety glasses saved me from getting it in the eyeballs, but the taste lingered on the flavor saver the rest of the day. Had to change shirt as well.
Those were Hyundai-Kia and Mori-Seiki systems, doing some very interesting machining on things I still can't talk much about.
It wasn't unusual to use your own mobile in the past, company phones tended to be limited to people who were on the road a lot. If you were lucky you might get a pager or, in a large team, there might be an "on call" mobile so it was simple convenience. Most of the time people respected that and would only call or message in a genuine emergency, such as when the warehouse came on-shift at 22:00 on a Sunday only to find the Friday late shift had changed the user* password on the ERP system and not told them.
One manager didn't understand the term "respect" though. He once called me three times in succession at around 2am without leaving a message. I ignored him, it turned out the only issue was a spreadsheet that wouldn't update and I couldn't have done anything about it from home in the the early hours anyway. I made it very clear that any repetition would result in a formal complaint. That manager was one of the reasons I left the company but that's another story!
We had plenty of experiences of Americans not understanding geography, on one occasion the corporate HR in the US asked our UK HR Manager to "pop over to Australia and help them with a problem!" They seemed to assume that as Australia were "British" they must be geographically close and were quite surprised when it was pointed out that they were a lot closer than we were.
*Yes, we had a single user for the entire warehouse as it wasn't viable for them to log on and off constantly. We'd have had a user per shift but the compliance people from the US were trying to insist we must not have any generic users, creating more than a couple would have generated unwanted attention.
Security requirements …. Very necessary these days for both practical and business (being able to tender) reasons. But some security people dream up solutions to problems which are entirely impractical for actual users and once the security paperwork is signed off they don’t want to change it. You just have to wait for the next iteration and hope someone else gets the gig.
The role of Security is to STOP things happening.
It can be either easy or hard to fulfil this requirement, The hard way involves designing a complex balanced risk system to take into account actual business requirements & resources, the easy way is to provide a blanket 'Thou shall / shall not...' set of rules with all the collateral damage that entails - the collateral damage normally doesn't affect Securities ability to achieve their goal because all they do is set the rules and look for violations.
Human nature will choose the least effort for maximum return every time and security experts are Human.
on one occasion the corporate HR in the US asked our UK HR Manager to "pop over to Australia and help them with a problem!"
In the late 1980s I used to play D&D with some work colleagues at ICL in Bracknell. One Monday I had just finalised where we would meet the coming Thursday evening. But on Wednesday I needed to check something, so called Liz*, only to be told that she was in Australia to help a client. I assumed that her colleague had misinformed me and meant Austria. But no, Liz had flown out to New South Wales to deal with a bug which only manifested with live, but personally sensitive data, so could not be done remotely. She was there two weeks (just long enough to reviver from the time difference) when she fixed the bug and had to return immediately.
*Yes, girls did and do play D&D, we're not all nerds like on 'The Big Bang Theory'
It wasn't unusual to use your own mobile in the past, company phones tended to be limited to people who were on the road a lot.
In the good old days, the only phone you had was on your desk, and when you went home it stayed there. I used the same policy with the company mobile.
I was working for a company where I was the whole of the team in Europe but my grade meant I got nothing for working outside normal hours. They tried to push a mobile phone on me so I could be called out of hours and I declined which caused a little friction so I offered to use the BYOD scheme and use my personal phone to pick up alerts and read email etcs. Once I read the details I withdrew the offer as the first step was to make them the admins for my phone with full remote control...yeah, not happening.
I then completed the rest of my time with them providing full support for my normal hours (plus a little extra when I was requested and had nothing else lined up). Slept well every night
Yes, we had something similar at my place (in UK). US had BYOD and our manager (who had transferred over from US) suggested we do that too. Many people were in agreement until I asked the simple question of "Doesn't installing the MobileIron client mean that it has the ability to wipe said device?", to which the reply from the guys who would be administering it was "...well it can, but we'd never use that functionality...". At that point everyone changed their minds and we got them to supply company mobiles.
I had one a while ago, where someone emailed the UK helpdesk (me) instead of the the US one.
He was having issues with the network point.
I wrote a long email regarding the temperature of the office may be too low due to the AC being turned up too high which caused the copped to contact and restrict the network traffic.
I suggested that he should carefully warm the cable under his desk with his hands, or he could contact the US help desk.
I got a nice email back saying he loved the joke and would contact the US helpdesk
I've lost count of the number of actual death threats I've encountered in IT help centres, when someone is asked to reboot their PC.
seriously..actual death threats.
"Enjoy your last couple of minutes in office, this conversation has been recorded and is now being forwarded to HR".
I once had, as a work phone, a recycled number from some for of internal legal desk of the police. People calling me in the night blurting out specific details about police actions before I could react. It takes a few of those calls before you understand what is going on. Called the police, changed number.
We're cautious about reissuing mobile numbers internally after one person had given their work number to a finance company. He was clearly in arrears with them but they refused to accept that it was a work phone and he was no longer with us, even after me contacting them directly. As the calls came from different random numbers they couldn't be blocked.
We ended up changing the number, and now generally do so routinely unless it's a sales manager's number passed on to their replacement,
Had a similar problem; people would call my extension asking for someone who wasn't there, and then refusing to call the correct number i gave them.
that stopped cold after I said "Look, I've given you the CORRECT number to call for this matter, and I've asked you multiple time to remove this one? If you continue, I will consider this harrassment, and forward it all to our legal department."
never got another call from them after that.
No where near that serious, but I get a lot of calls on my land line this time of year wanting me to change medical insurance plans (I'm retired). One of my responses is "Why would I do business with a company whose first action is to violate US Federal law?" My line is on the Do Not Call list, so the calls are actually illegal. Got one today, where after a slight pause, the person on the other end said she'd put my number on their do not call list. Since the open enrollment period ends tomorrow, the calls should taper off the the normal sorts of scams for a some months.
When I first started, I was given a bleep (internal use only), never used it so gave it to a colleague that wanted one.
After a couple of months, he complained that every call he had was for some one else.
Strange thing is that I had the same issue - that's why I got rid of it.
Not sure what happened to the bleep, he may have gave it away to another sucker!
Many years ago and in another country, a security company ended up one digit away from our home phone. That meant calls from their customers when alarms went off in the small hours.
The only thing we found that would fix things was answering the phone, assuring them that someone was on the way, and going back to bed.
I don't know if they changed their number or went out of business, but the calls stopped.
I had a similar problem with faxes for a finance company going to my home number (same number, wrong area code)
Solved by setting up a home office fax and faxing back with "approved" or "rejected, bad credit" written over the front
3 years of complaints didn't stop the calls, but that tactic did
A friend of mine ended up with the former telephone number of the sales contact for a popular provider of ingredients for restaraunts. That provider only contacted his customers to update the telephone number when my friend started taking orders.
Warren missed a trick there, he could haven taken charge of the issue and then sent an eye watering invoice to his former boss.
We have the same number as a local business except for one digit, a 6/8 swap which could be confused depending on the font. We used to get calls for them. I eventually rung them to ask if the typography on their sales material was unclear. They said it wasn't but I wonder if they changed it as the calls stopped.
If you swap the last two digits around on my home phone number, you'll get the local Chinese around the corner.
Fortunately, I only had one idiot that made that mistake.
The worse one was some years ago*, where some old dear that would ring my personal mobile every week for nearly a year trying to speak to her daughter. She thought it was hilarious that she managed to dial the wrong number yet again! If I didn't answer, she would leave a message
Over time, I go less and less patient and polite, one week I had a bad day and starting swearing at her (first time - honest, normally I would just cut her off!). She never made that mistake again!!!
* PAYG, before contracts, had to pay for voice mail etc and before blocking numbers was a feature on phones
I've only ever had to be officially "on call" at one consulting gig, they said it would be one week per month. I said I would have to charge something for that time, though I'd never done that on a contract before so I wasn't really sure what I should ask for. They said their standard is they pay a quarter of your hourly rate for on-call time, plus your normal rate for any time you are actually called upon. When I quickly did the math in my head that I'd get paid for an additional 32 hours in the weeks when I was on call I told them that arrangement would be fine by me.
When I actually was on call the first time I only got called once (I had been worried it would be a nightmare based on how much time they spent talking about it) so after that I made it known among the others in the on call rotation that if they needed someone to cover their week to let me know. The other guys were full time employees so I'm not sure how (or even if) they were compensated for being on call but I'm guessing not well or at all because they were constantly grumbling about being on call.
As a result, they were constantly finding reasons to hand off their on call to me, and I made out like a bandit the first 4 or 5 months. Then suddenly no one was giving me their on call weeks anymore and it was just the once a month until the end of the contract. I think the manager overseeing that project (or the beancounter overseeing its budget) kept seeing all this extra time on my timesheet and told the full timers to cut it out lol
I have a personal cell and a work issued iPhone. Nobody outside of management has my personal cell number, and when I clock out for the day I turn off the company iPhone. Fortunately, I'm not salaried, so anything that happens outside my scheduled hours is not normally my concern as I'm not on call.
I also mute my personal phone and leave it in my home office to charge at night.
I dont get this militant , "I will go out of my way to not be contacted " ethos.
If they are taking the piss , sure , employ those measures and quote your contract etc , or change jobs.
But for people in jobs not having the piss taken , whats the problem at least answering the phone, it could be a five second response that saves someone on site hours , like "whats the combo to the key cabinet" ?
We have an Whatsapp group for this. Anyone who is on call who runs into a problem posts the problem there and there will always be someone to help them out.
Maybe not in the middle of the night, but we're not in a line of work where nocturnal calls are common, it's mostly evenings and weekends.
OK you helped with that 5 second call.
Later: I don't see whats the issue with you waking up at 3am, travelling 45mins to the CEO's house and plugging in a usb cable he pulled out. Yes I KNOW its the 8th call this week and its only Wednesday!
FFS he can't use his mouse! get on it. No we won't pay you. Do it because you love the company......
In one job, during the annual review, my boss asked about my loyalty to the company. I said that I was every bit as loyal to the company as the company was loyal to me. He didn't like that answer. A couple of years later, I was let go in a major "reduction in force". Didn't get around to pointing out to him that I was *still* as loyal to the company as it was to me.
The problem is that there can be a fine line from a normal thing I'm happy to help with to people taking liberties that are causing problems, and it's not always systemic. As I said in a different comment, I have been fortunate that most jobs I've had have not abused their access to my personal contact information, which is why my colleagues tend to have mine.
However, I have had the problem with things like email. For example, when I wrote and maintained a piece of internal software, people could email me with support requests and I would be happy to answer them. Most users did this rarely, and in that case, I didn't object much even if their question could be solved without my help with the documentation we already had. A small number of users, however, decided that I should be emailed every time they had any question, no matter how minor, and that if I didn't respond quickly, they should just send more emails. That kind of thing can cause several problems. It wasn't my manager or my team. It wasn't even very many of the users. It was just a few people causing problems for everyone else. The risk with answering the odd call is that you suddenly get more odd calls.
I'm with you. While I understand the desire to have separate work and personal phones, I have only a personal phone and have given the number to my manager and co-workers, and when on call, the on-call number (2nd line of my manager's desk phone) is forwarded to my mobile. I'm on call one week in three. Work only calls when STRICTLY necessary, and the first-line support (on site 24/7) can't handle the problem, so one call a month average. There really are companies and managers that don't abuse this. (It helps that the boss used to do my job.)
I work for a US corp. There are five timezones in the continental US so in theory they should know how timezones work outside the US, yet somehow they don't. They just dump work on me at my end of day and expect it done by their end of day.
Also some of them reply to emails during their night. I'm not going to wait till their start of day to send a bunch of emails. They seem to think that turning off the fucking phone or at the very least turning on do not disturb is not an option.
Also in my efforts to try and maintain a semblance of a work-life balance while working for a US company I have a work number and the SIM is disabled unless I'm on call. Outlook and Teams aren't installed, if it's important they'll call me, but that'll only work if I'm on call.
I've seen that, and not just from Americans and Canadians. For example, a British person setting up a meeting for a time in GMT even though the UK was in summer time at the time. Fortunately they used the GMT label and not UTC, because if they had said UTC I probably would have believed them and used it.
This post has been deleted by its author
> Nobody seemed to understand the difference between PT, PST, and PDT
I can answer that...
First: Most countries have only one time zone, so a new employee from one of them needs some time to adjust.
Second: "PT", "PST", "PDT" are USA-North-America-specific, and Microsoft is an INTERNATIONAL company. As the VERY first comment states: "lease try to avoid these abbreviations if any part of your audience lives outside of North America.". Read the most voted answer how chaotic PT, PST and PDT actually are. Expecting that 95.3% of the world population "of course has to know" what 4.3% of the world population get taught from Kindergarden on... And even North-Americans have to struggle sometimes. Let alone those 4.3% effectively live on their own large island bubble separated by a lot of water, with a friendly neighbor to the north and a laughable short actual southern border compared to the size, and with no invasion from outside for WAY over 150 years (Or > 200 years? And I ignore that single attack 4000 miles of US coast > 80 years go, which WILL offend some).
About you: All USA people I have a more personally contact with (even if it is just business mail or Fecesbook or whatever) never behave the way you do, not even remotely. So you are among that type which actually shame your country and are responsible for lowering the reputation.
I recommend, for you, youtube channels with people who actually live(d) inside and outside US, and therefore all got a reverse culture shock when returning:
Baguette Bond (US living in France)
Hayley Alexis (US livin' in Germany, but currently living back in US with her German boyfriend who likes the USA)
Jay Stephan (US livin' half year in Germany and half in US)
Trip Bitten (US who was livin' in China for 13 years and recently moved to Portugal)
Feli from Germany (German living in the US)
NALF (US Nick Alfieri, football player, living in Germany)
There are tons of those on Youtube. My list is German-Centric, for the obvious reason you might expect. And they teach me what type of "Typical German Behavior" might offend others. Like my long answer here, which WILL offend some, but I stay to my German Directness. But I warn those I care about about German Directness when they ask something which usually gets that type of answer.
(Wow, that rant got longer than expected....)
Many of my colleagues are on Central European Time and so I am forced to take my lunch at 11:00 or have it interrupted, or meeting assigned in it.
I have tried marking my lunch time as 'in a meeting' every day, but upper management said I must not, and it did not stop all those people who ignored it anyway.
The only correct response to this is to schedule all of your meetings with the worst offenders at 11:30am or in the afternoon when they would be wanting to leave, say 4pm your time.
When they start declining your meetings or complaining about lunch times or wanting to leave early, remind them that you also happen to like to having lunch at the standard time for the UK. 90% of them will realise the point and leave you alone during lunch time in future. The 10% are usually managers and will be d%&ks, no matter what you do...
I have a few set times where I am not available (not lunch, but something else).
When someone schedules something at that time, I a) decline the meeting, and b) when it is just sprung on me, I just don't attend. My internal signature also explicitly states that those times are non-negotiable. People learned very quickly to a) check my calendar, and b) follow instructions as per my signature. Now everyone pretty much complies :-)
I fully appreciate the malicious compliance/passive aggressive behaviour from some of the posters on this thread, because like them, I've been subjected to calls at stupid o'clock asking for something that my stand-in knew/should've known, or managers being prize dickheads and ignoring the fact that it's my personal mobile number.
As for IT turning your personal device into a 'managed device', yeah, *NOT* happening here. When our organisation decided that all systems (including Teams and Outlook) could only be used on company-managed devices, I made it clear to my manglement that that would mean that I would *not* be attending anything remotely if I was travelling (which I used to be able to do with a Teams call), and thus, I would be less reachable if something were to go wrong. Thankfully my direct manager has a similar attitude to me and that we agree that the company would need to spring for a company phone if they want me to be reachable all the time. Sadly, the only problem that I have is that my meeting calendar internally is no longer really accessible on my personal device (so I know what meetings are when), but then again, if I'm out of reach anyway, why should I care.
"I say partially, because I have cow-orkers who don't bother looking at the busy/free times when they set up the calls.."
Doesn't the calendar booking automatically show invitees calendar conflicts? And if not, just decline the meeting appointment with "calendar conflict"
I once had an "anonymous" formal complaint lodged against me for declining a meeting request and asking for it to be scheduled during my work hours, not 2 hours after I went home for the day. My manager talked to me about it (was probably required to), and suggested I "try to be more flexible". He didn't push, though, pretty sure he understood it was an unreasonable request.
As only one person ever sent an after-hours meeting request (and it could have been handled through email instead), I knew who it was. His attitude was "you're a contractor, you'll jump when I say to". Never mind I wasn't contracted to his department, and had worked there longer than him!
"No, it is not," Warren replied, explaining that he had changed jobs but had the number of someone who could help.
I guess he could have employed this strategy before leaving the job, rather than stumbling around London in the small hours like an idiot.
Back in the days of 7-digit dialing when an area code was only needed for actually dialing long distance, my dad had the same 7-digit phone number as a hospital in the neighboring area code. When the midnight calls happened, he would politely tell them to dial the correct area code. Because, well, people don't call hospitals at midnight because a good thing has happened and they are having a happy day.
However... Failure to listen didn't go over too well. After explaining their error, some people would still request to be transferred or connected to a patient's room. "You need to talk to the surgeon in person", or "They died" were common responses.
We were arguing Bluetooth authentication, re: claim 4 digits are all people can use. I suggest that manual say "put the number of the girl who would have been your girl-friend if only ...". Coleagre says "722.. ", I interrupt, say "hey' that's a Seattle number". He "I didn't say which area code". Number (east coast area code) was that of his then girl-friend, now wife.
When I was working in London on Unix software development (largely in-house software to make the Unix support teams job easier) - scripts, utilities, monitoring software etc. (Anyone heard of ICL "Aspect"?), I was on call one night, and got woken by my phone ringing at about 3.00am (I wouldn't have the phone on if I wasn't on call)
It was a guy in one of the Texas offices, asking me if I could fix a paper jam or something in his office printer.
To be fair, he was extremely apologetic when I told him in was 3.00am, and I'm in London, but to be fair, it wasn't his fault - he'd logged a call properly and some clueless support guy in Stevenage (or one that didn't like me) routed the call to me instead of local site services in Dallas!
A help desk was being abused by people phoning at odd hours of the night. The team said once a month was OK - but not twice a week.
The manager solved this by having the "out of hours phone" at night and the weekend. He would decide if it was worth calling out the guys to fix it.
He did call out his team a couple of times, but most of the time it was "it can wait till morning". He say he would call his people out - at a rate of $1000 an hour, minimum charge $1000. Most people said it could wait till morning.
In the late 90s, I was on a contract where we had an "on call" rota. In theory I could have had a pint in the pub in the evening, legally drive home, then be called out to a site. Customer had a "zero alcohol" policy, so I could have been breathalysed and be off the contract.
In practise, we did nothing outside contract hours before we had a charge form faxed through (faxes were still ordinary).
With the prospect of money coming out of their budget, its amazing how many problems could wait until morning, when they would be "free" again.
I work for a company that has a habit of selling 24/7 365 support contracts to businesses without having the people with the required skills or access to those customers. But they do have someone on 24/7 call, who must then try and find a consultant with the right skills and access who will answer the phone, out of the goodness of their heart, because they're not on call, ie. Not being paid to be available, though they would get paid a call out fee. I've had a few words with the higher ups over the practice over the years. If i'm not on call, my phone is on silent and i will only answer if it suits me, or awake.
A few years ago, my (US) cell phone somehow got entered as contact info for a number of Cradlepoints clients. Od get calls at odd hours requesting permission to close a ticket. I'd tell them they had the wrong number, and to please remove mine.
I finally got a call from their UK support, at 0500 my time. I asked to escalate the issue to their Director/VP of customer support, which they said they couldn't do because they were aleep... well so was I.
I finally found contact info for the VP, and it still took 2 weeks to finally stop getting calls. Needless to say I avoid their product whenever possible.
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