Paladin Roaming

OOPSie

Yesterday.... well actually it started a couple of weeks ago....

Seems that an order for one of MY clients was misdirected to the regular installers, the guys that work the cash-paying customers, outside. Those guys are good -- have to be since they are customer facing. They keep up with all the latest offering and equipment and rules -- which I don't.

But internally the job is far different, enough so that many years ago they split off a group to do internal only -- OCS, where I was lucky enough to land nearly 20 years ago. And after 20 years I'm still learning some of the quirks of our old buildings. (Think about it -- how many 80-year-old buildings have been continuously occupied by the original group?)

The client was being kicked out of her 1st floor office, moving her two lines to her desk in the upstairs supply room. The single line there to be moved to the first floor to for the person taking over her desk. No problem -- for OCS.

Anyhow, the Tech arrived, did a "say what?" and called his boss. His boss said, paraphrased, hearsay, "no, we are not giving the job to OCS where it belongs. We are going to violate the contract and business ethics and YOU WILL DO IT!" So he did. AND I must admit I'm impressed at how far he got. This was at the Birch C.O., which has inventoried house cables. Meaning that our internal connections look to the system as if they are outside. With separate cables to the first floor and the second floor. He managed to get the second line re-assigned to and cut on the frame to go to the second floor, arriving on a 66-block on the backboard. Cross connected the dial tone to the correct 66-block to feed the cat-5 patch panel and ran a patch cord to the correct floor jack. Where he ran into a little trouble seeing as while the phone LOOKED like a two-line phone it wasn't.

Meanwhile.... that line recieved the calls from the building entry doors, where suppliers make their delieveries (hence the desk in the supply room.) Since it could not be hooked to the desk phone, it was not working in the supply room. The OOPSie came with the wireless phone. We have installed a Nortel box and a Spectralink wireless system in the Central Office -- people get a phone that they can keep with them. The wireless system is wired in parallel to the antique Key Telephone System with the 40-year-old pushbutton desk phones. Client had her lines on her wireless phone so she would not miss a call from a delivery person standing at the front door wanting to deliver things that people are waiting for -- for our cash paying outside customers. When the line was moved to the second floor it was removed from the first floor -- and the wireless system.

House Cable One (A) is the original lead-sheathed terminating on the original screw-down wood blocks (B). The KTS (Key Telephone System) equipment (D) terminates on the pink boards (C) and is cross connected to the 25-pair 'floor' cables going to the various desks and rooms. Somewhere along the line they required KTS lines to appear on the second floor as well as the first, so a tie cable was run between floors. Likewise to the third floor. This is the 1.3 closet, there is similar 1.1 and 1.2 closets. As the house cable terminated here, the KTS was mounted here. When we added the Wireless there was no room in the 1.3 the wireless is mounted in the 1.2. It is not easy to trace out, and if you don't know about the wireless being a separate but equal system it is not unexpected that you will overlook it.

Bottom line: people standing at the front door with packages to be delivered were now unable to deliver. Needed supplies didn't get to the outside techs, jobs were delayed, money lost. Escalate up, comes back down to my boss -- "Who did this order" "Not me" "Not me" "Not me" . . . .

Long story short, I fixed it all up yesterday. Would have been easier if I had gotten the order in the first place, two weeks ago.

Posted by Paladin at December 2, 2006 07:06 AM