How To Anger People With State of the Art Technology

As always happens at work, a "emergency situation" came up. A corporate emergency, mind you, not a real, "need-EMS, life-threatening, important" type of emergency...but I digress. This time, we at least had a day to react. My role was to facilitate the modification of one of our laptops in order for someone to go on the road with it to record data.

To do this, I needed to enlist the help of our resident computer genius. So here I was late in the day calling his cell phone number. The phone rang...and rang...and rang. "No problem," I thought. "I should be sent to his voice mail soon." But suddenly, a recorded voice came on at the other end to tell me that "the cellular phone I am trying to reach is unavailable."

Hmm, that's weird. Maybe a phone problem? Thinking it was a fluke, I reset my phone and redialed immediately.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

"There is no answer. The cellular number you are calling is unavailable."

OK...I guess his voice mail really isn't working right. I'll wait a bit to see if it resets itself, then try again.

How about again?

And again.

One more time.

Ten minutes and four calls later, I still couldn't get through to his voice mail. Finally deciding that it really must be malfunctioning, I decide to just leave him an e-mail. It's getting late in the day and I want to go home, and it's not like I was expecting to have it done today anyway. But as I'm typing out a quick note, I decide that there couldn't be any harm in trying one final time.

Ring.

"There is no answer. The cellular number you are calling is unavailable."

Whoa. Now that was odd. One ring and out? I guess I'll really have to let him know he may have a phone problem when I see him tomorrow. He might not be aware of it.

I finished the e-mail and packed up my stuff for the night. As I started away from my desk and headed towards my daily release from corporate purgatory, my phone suddenly rang. At the other end of the phone was the man I had been futilely chasing after.

"Dude," he said, "what's going on? You called?"

"Um yeah," I stammered, not quite expecting this. How had he known I was calling? I never got through to his voice mail.

"I saw all your calls," he said matter of factly, without a hint of sarcasm in his voice. "I just kept hitting the unavailable button 'cause I had to keep working on something. What's happening?"

One of the joys of voice communication is that you cannot see the other person turn crimson with embarassment. The whole time I was trying in vain to get to his voice mail, he had been fully aware of the 500 or so times I called within 20 minutes. I had completely underestimated the simple and widely used technology known as Caller ID.

Tail between my legs, I explained my situation to him as calmly as I could, trying to ignore the fact that I was likely perceived to have committed one of the most heinous corporate actions ever: the "badger page." The infuriating situation in which one insistently calls a person on a minute by minute basis if a response does not come within 30 seconds of the last call. I felt like a total tool, worthy of executive consideration, hoping he realized that it was really just a simple misunderstanding.

I guess I'll know how he really felt if I find my computer sabotaged tomorrow.