Dear dimwit on the phone

I pay for it myself, print the receipt out and get paid back from petty cash.

The juco does live scoring for baseball and softball as long as they can get a wifi hookup. The high schools do what they can but usually upload it later.

 

Didn't want to start a new thread on this, but the topic of phones got me to wanting to ask you all to name some of the dumbest things your company has ever done. Here's one involving phones.

One company I worked at for many years decided to save some money on the phone system. There's a phone at every desk. They brought in an expert to explain the new phone system and all the ways to make calls and do all this cool stuff. The expert spoke so fast and taught the "new phone system" classes so poorly virtually nobody in the plant could do anything but make an outgoing call. Since everybody has a cellphone in this world it's not that big a deal, except when people call the newspaper, nobody knows how to transfer calls, etc. It's pretty comical. There's no reason to try to slow down those people who run "how to" classes in newsrooms. You just let them do their thing and try to figure it out on your own later.

 

We switched to a new phone system a few months back. It took all of us a while to get used to everything, because the new system is so much more complicated than what we had. Instead of hitting one button to transfer someone, you've got to mash two or three -- maybe it's just two ... I'm too lazy to look it up.

We didn't have a class or anyone come in and teach us about the new system. All we've got is a PDF with all the codes and everything. It's a pain in the ass to look through if you forget anything, too.

 

This was more than 15 years ago. I took a three-week vacation to Europe (the first time I was ever off from work for that length of time). The day I returned to work, I showed up at 4 p.m., my regular time, walked into my department and am told that I'm going to be late for a meeting unless I hustled downstairs to a conference room. Uh, what meeting? No one knew. So I run downstairs to this meeting, which turned out to be a presentation of some sort of email news dispersal program. I started to get nervous about 45 minutes in and I said to myself, "I've been sitting here for 45 minutes and I have no idea what these people are talking about." Just then, the sports editor, my boss, raised his hand and is acknowledged by one of the guys doing the presentation. My boss said, "I've been sitting here for 45 minutes and I have no idea what you guys are talking about." I chuckled outwardly. Inside, I was laughing my ass off. Never heard anything about this program again.

 

Out phone system was installed sometime before 1990. I don't even know if we could replace a phone if it went kaput. The system doesn't work when the power is out, which we discovered about 15 years ago when a windstorm knocked out power to the entire town for 12 hours. We could only make or receive calls on the fax machine and that number wasn't listed in the phone book, so all these people calling the other lines thought either we weren't there or we were ignoring them.

When the power returns, the phones come back on with default settings. Every phone rings LOUD as hell and I'm one of only two people in the building who can go out to the main phone and reset everything.

Due to how ancient the phone system is, we can't have caller ID and we can't have voice mail. I can always hear the person on the other end grousing when I have to tell him we don't have voice mail.

 

Sounds similar to our experience with a program that was supposed to make it so that our newspaper only needed one computer with InDesign on it. The rest of us would log into a portal and share the program. But it had this odd-ass way of getting stories to the portal through email and another more difficult way of getting photos to it (also via email). Then it turned out they hadn't thought of things like sports agate, so I was going to have to make a PDF file of my agate and send it to the page as if it was a photo or an ad. Yeah.

We couldn't make the stories appear on the page in the right format. And if the internet or the power ever went out, we couldn't keep working on the page. And the internet companies in this little burg are ass, so outages were common. I was highly concerned that the internet would go out moments before deadline and I'd be screwed with the guys at the press 20 miles yonder looking at a half-done page wondering what the fuck I was doing.

Crews from the "mother ship" came over three times to try to make it work. Our most recent past publisher heard about the system, thought it was wonderful and was going to give us seven days notice that we were switching to it until I spent 20 minutes with him showing everything that was wrong.

The "mother ship" crew came over one more time. One of the co-owners of the chain asked us how we felt it would work. I told him all of my concerns and wrapped up my thoughts with "I feel like it's set up for me to fail and fail often."

I doubt my answer actually influenced his opinion, at least not by itself. We all had concerns that this was going to be a nightmare. But about three months later, the project was put on hold. This was, IIRC, in 2012. We haven't heard a thing about it since.

 

In our newsroom, EE is the only one with caller ID. We do have voicemail though!

 

In the vein of computer tech gone wrong ...
First, some background.
It's June 1, 2001, and my then-wife and I are covering the Ohio high school track meet in Dayton. I'm working full time as an all-around reporter/photographer for a then twice-a-week paper (the Mrs. also worked there in the production department) and part time in a sports department of a daily paper in a nearby city. The daily paper printed the twice-a-week paper, and six of the eight schools I covered at the smaller paper were covered by the daily. It was an arrangement everyone at both papers was comfortable with.
All that was the easy part.
Between the two papers, I'm covering some 80-odd kids in some 50-odd events spread across all three of the state's divisions at a two-day event. And I'm taking pics for the twice-weekly paper.
Oh, yeah, the wife's pregnant. No, there was no birth at the meet, though that would have made for a nice sidebar. She was only about four months along; showing some but doing alright.
Since the deadline for the weekend edition of the twice-weekly was done early on the first day of the meet, I only had to really concentrate on the daily paper's stories. The smaller paper's next edition was that upcoming Wednesday.
Easy enough, but still plenty to do.
I had three stories at the end of the first day — one on an area girls team en route to winning the state title that year, and two more generalized roundups separated by gender.
The photographer from the daily paper also gave me a disk (remember, it's 2001) and asked me to E-mail the photos to the paper. She was from the Dayton area and wanted to spend time with her family.
No problem.
The wife and I grab a quick bite when my last kid is done and then head to the hotel so I can write the stories in relative quiet on the company laptop.
Again, no problem.
Now for the fun.
The daily paper had Internet access and E-mail, but the E-mail came with a catch.
To send in a story, I had to call the paper and let them know to have anyone who was online at the time to get offline.
Then I had hang up, connect the computer to the phone line, log the computer onto the paper's Internet system (more like an intranet system) and then E-mail each story and the pictures to the paper.
A bit drawn out, but I got it done.
Then I called in to see if there were any issues.
The answer was a big yes.
The system combined all three stories together, interweaving sentences from each into one long incoherent mess.
All attempts to remedy the situation failed.
I ended up dictating each story over the phone to a coworker so he could type them.
The pictures never arrived and are still out there somewhere, floating in the ether.
My part of the fiasco ended when I read my last sentence and went to bed at 3 a.m.
Meanwhile, the sports editor was having a fit at the paper. But not with me. He knew I'd done what I could.
He was mad at 1) the Internet/E-mail system we were saddled with, and 2) the circulation manager who was literally hovering over his shoulder, asking every few minutes when we would be done because we were holding up the delivery drivers and carriers.
I later heard it took a lot of self restraint for my boss not to punch the guy.

Fun side note:
On the second day, I'm running around, interviewing kids and coaches.
As luck would have it, I need to talk with two people from different events at different locations.
I enlist my pregnant wife to tell one of the kids I'll be back in a moment while I go talk to the other interviewee.
I return a few minutes later to speak with a somewhat scared high school boy.
When I'm done, he leaves and I find out why he was acting so strangely.
When told I would be back in a few minutes, he begins to say he must go to the other side of the stadium to be with his coach.
My pregnant wife cuts him off mid sentence, points at him and tells him he WILL stay put until I return.
He stammers a 'yes, ma'am' and doesn't move.

 

Today's dimwit is either the softball coach who told her scorekeeper that each base advancement on what should be wild pitches and passed balls are stolen bases or the scorekeeper who put them that way into Gamechanger without clarifying it with the coach. Because I'm fairly certain otherwise that this team did not steal home as many times as they think they did.

 

Dear coach,
When you email pictures of the scorebook after the game, please write somewhere what the final score was so we don't have to waste our time counting up every run.

 

The problem is (no offense, ape) this post is an annual. So repeat after me, coach: If the runner's going, it's a steal. If not, it's a passed ball or wild pitch. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

How many runs were scored? Seems like if you have a 5-3 or a 6-4 game, it wouldn't take that much time.