The case of the mysterious tied-up telephone lines.

I only thought I was going to be researching those telephone company contracts today. I was partially right. I am dealing with both our telephone equipment vendor and the local telephone company, but not about the data T1, it’s the voice T1 that’s throwing fits. Monday we had a short period of time where no one could dial out, and then again today it happened, a couple of times. Every outgoing call rang busy, because it wouldn’t pick up an outside line. Now since the busy signal came in after you dialed the number, I suspected the telephone company, but I know from prior experience that they are going to ask us to check the internal equipment first, so we called that company. After lecturing me about the fact that we have all our calls going through the T1 circuit with no copper backup, (Excuse me? Your company sold it to us that way, and installed it that way! I’m not a telephone systems expert, that why we hired you to handle it!) he informed me that he checked all of our internal stuff and it all seems to be working, and that he called Ameritech and got them to open up a trouble ticket on it. They’ll be testing it after hours tonight.

And yes, he redeemed himself by calling Ameritech and handling that for us, because that saved me a lot of time and effort, as anyone who has ever called them for technical support can tell you!

Also, before anyone suggests that maybe all the available lines are tied up, there are 24 channels on a T1 circuit, we have 23 employees, 2 fax machines and a 4 port voice mail, for a maximum of 29 users (30 if I’m dialed into the telephone database system through a direct modem connection, which I wasn’t.), the chances of 24 of those 29 all being in use at the same time are ridiculously low. There is obviously something wrong, hopefully they’ll find it tonight. Either way, I’m tired of telephone companies, and the contracts are still sitting right on top of my to-do basket. *sigh*

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