Telephone answering and secretarial services
because every business needs an extra pair of hands
Overheard conversations
"The president of my division was flying from our main business office to our main engineering facility. When he was waiting in the airport for a flight, he overheard a conversation between two people sitting near him that were getting on the same flight as him. He later called someone in my office and reported back what he heard..." More...
"We had a conference call between us and a supplier. At some point we needed to discuss something amongst ourselves so we told the suppliers we were going 'off the air' for a minute and put the phone on mute. To our amazement, the suppliers thought that because they could no longer hear us that we could no longer hear them..." More...
"I hear the guy behind me start speaking very loudly on his phone. He then tells some guy repeatedly an IP to 'just login to'. I'm amused, since it sounds like it could be an external IP even, so I try it. Figure why not. It responds to ping. Hmmmm..." Source
Call centres
"We received a call one night from a very angry customer whose cable TV was out. Smoke was coming from the box and it was very hot. He insisted that we send a tech immediately. We told him he needed to call the fire department. The customer refused, saying that it was our box and he was not going to run the risk of the fire department charging him to deal with our stuff." More...
Voicemails
These are genuine messages left on our answering machine. Names have been blanked to protect the innocent.
"Mobilize this"
"Where's my boy's money?"
"Jackarse!"
"Utterly ridiculous, man is nowhere near a Christian"
Inappropriate 999 emergency calls
"A male caller has dialled 999 to say that his wife has gone out without leaving any food to eat." More...
"It was basically a lady who had called up and requested police attendance because there was a spider in her bath, This poor lady was obviously petrified, but we had to explain that the first response of the police probably wasn't what it deserved." More...
"As well as the woman who phoned demanding her boyfriend's arrest over a rain-soaked hamster, other calls received by one Welsh force in 2007 include 'Can the police come round and take my mother-in-law away? She has been here for 18 days.' and 'My husband has the TV remote and won't let me watch EastEnders.'" More...
"Nowhere is sheer human idiocy highlighted more sharply than in a medium size room in a leafy corner of Huntingdon. That room, in Cambridgeshire Constabulary headquarters, in Hinchingbrooke Park, is where all the 999 calls for Cambridge, Peterborough, Huntingdonshire and Fenland are taken. 'Some 80 per cent of the calls we get here are non-emergency,' said force control room manager chief inspector Mike Winters, raising his eyebrows. 'Which means only 20 per cent of them are emergencies.'" More...
"Police have revealed their wackiest 999 calls as the service celebrates its 70th birthday. Hoaxers and timewasters have plagued the emergency line since its launch on June 30, 1937. They include a man who demanded help with his crossword, a woman with shampoo in her eyes and another with a bleeding spot." More...
"Essex Police top 10 daftest 999 calls, including a man ringing for advice after his wife mistakenly got on the wrong bus while out shopping and ended up in Romford; and a person who rang 999 to ask what the weather would be like the next day because they wanted to have a picnic." More...
Technical anecdotes
"There was a similiar type of incident when British Telecom switched their first telephone exchange from analogue to digital. In order to ensure a complete switchover, the decision was made to physically cut the analogue connections inplace, so there was no going back. They chose a long weekend (public holiday monday) in order to do this, so it gave them more time to fix any problems. After starting early saturday morning, by sunday evening they had the exchange fully on digital and were congratulating themselves - and then the exchange crashed, entirely..." More...
"We had a bank of modems and to check which modem went to which phone number (people sometimes switched them without telling us) we would have to call the number on a voice phone across the way and then run over to the modem bank to see which lights were on. Often the modem lights wouldn't stay on long enough from a mere phone call. Rather than run fast and risky in a crowded, wiry data center, I discovered that if I whistled certain frequencies mirroring the connect sound, the modem would think I was another modem and spend a longer time trying to connect. Thus, by learning to speak modemese, I could walk instead of run." Source