Mortaine’s Blog

Ok, I’m at work, bored out of my skull, because all of my current projects rely on other people– who are too busy to work on them right now. Not a problem, in that these are not high-priority projects, but it means that today and possibly tomorrow are kind of boring days.

Here at work, we have an intercom system that anyone can use just by picking up the phone. Here are three things that crack me up about our Intercom system:

1. There is another person named “Stephanie” who works at the company. Despite the fact that I started working here over 3 months ago, some people have not updated their phone lists and do not realize that there are two of us now. She is a highly mobile employee, never staying at her desk for long, so she gets paged frequently. In contrast, I only get paged when people are looking at the old phone list and trying to figure out my phone extension and can’t find it on the list. Sometimes, people forget to use last names when they page other people. Because most of the pages are for the other Stephanie, I usually just put on my headphones and tune out the intercom entirely. This saves my sanity– otherwise, I’d be writing and stopping every 5 minutes when I heard my name.
2. Because you use the phone to page people, clumsy callers often have trouble. There’ll be a page “Joe Smith, call extension 109,” followed by 5 seconds of clunking noises as the person at extension 109 tries to get the handset back onto the phone.
3. It’s hard to hear the intercom when you’re actually paging someone. This is one of my favorites from a few weeks ago. I recognized the pager’s voice– it was J from marketing (names changed to protect the guilty):
   “Eric, are you there?”
   “Eric?”
   “Eric?”
   “Eric, are you there?”
   “Eric?”
   Long pause. . . . We thought he was done.
   “Eric?”
   It was really quite sad, actually. I mean, here he was, this totally CLUELESS marketing guy, who’s actually quite on top of things most of the time, sounding like an utter moron trying to call one of his co-workers.

Oh, another thing I find funny about the intercom is the fact that people will page each other for the silliest things. I will never forget the day I heard a page: “Joe Smith, please come to the green table. Joe to the green table.”

Of course, “green table” is a code word in our company, a secret phrase to designate a specific location. Where, you may ask, is this top-secret location? Is the “green table” some sort of strategy room or planning area, with blinking lights and strategic diagrams? Well, sort of.

The “green table” is our ping-pong table. “Joe” was being called up for his turn.