Ever since I started working for an SMB my relationship with my desk phone has devolved into nebulous loathing. The device by itself is fine, and functions as it should, for as functional as any telephone can be. It’s the way that other people treat it that leads to my blazingly strong hatred for the entire technology.

My work line is an oubliette. Anyone who has watched the movie, Labyrinth, knows full well what an Oubliette is, and that’s my voicemail account at work. There is no limit to the number of callers, most of them salespeople. The problem with telephones is that for many organizations, especially big ones, their phone companies have elected to trunk calls to random Direct Inward Dials, DID numbers so that you get random calls from somewhere oddly close to you. So, for example, a salesperson trying to reach me from Cisco, for example, calls in and the DID is from Dowagiac, Michigan. Sure it is. So, because DIDs aren’t reliable, dependable, or even honest really, the fact that there is a Caller ID is meaningless since the data throughout the system is GIGO. A little aside, GIGO is like sludge and wine, if you have a barrel of wine and you add one tablespoon of sludge, then you have a barrel of sludge. If you add a tablespoon of wine to a barrel of sludge, you have a barrel of sludge. Much like everything else, a tablespoon of GIGO makes the entire experience crap. Because you can’t tell when GIGO hits, or when it doesn’t, or even what is GIGO and what isn’t GIGO. So it’s all crap. So, I have a DID for work, and I can’t use it. because it’s been “Lost to Salespeople”. So then I had a clean DID for my cell phone, until one of the fine-and-respectable companies I do business with sold the number to a directory and now I get endless calls from my cell. So, I turn on the “Silence Unknown Callers” option, and if you aren’t in my address book, then my cell phone DID is a dead duck.

I faced an issue at work, I needed to get support for a thing, and so I thought to myself, what number could I give them? And I didn’t have anything. I couldn’t give them my work DID, because I don’t answer it. There’d be no point to offer a number that you won’t pick up on. I can’t use my Cell DID, because they come in on random DID inbounds and none of that is saved in my address book. Their calls would be silenced and tossed.

So, because people are generally just vaguely wretched and dull creatures, we have to turn to an app, I picked Hushed. For $47 a year I can rent random DIDs to use, DIDs safe enough so that when they do get a call, I can just pick up, because I know that the inbound caller isn’t a salesperson looking to run their high-pressure sales techniques on me.

So we invented this lovely technology, then we ruined it with our greedy perversions, forcing us to spend even more money to cope. We can’t have nice things, because, people. Obviously.

So if you are in IT, and you’ve lost your DIDs to the ravening horde of salespeople, maybe look into burner phones or apps like Hushed. Things will be fine until we exhaust the pool of DIDs that the provider has. LOL. At some point in the future, I can see salespeople just calling random numbers, because you don’t know what DID your prospective customer is using because they were trying to cope with the burden of escaping from you. And the cycle of wretchedness continues.