Why is it so hard to understand that when I'm on vacation, I specifically want to avoid the stress of planning this activity and making those arrangements? I mean, we do take a family vacation in July every year. Why can't my 'me' vacation just be about pretending to be a happily unemployed loser?

None of it mattered once I got back to the office anyway. With Monday through Thursday of last week to prepare for the Big Cutover, number ports for most of the company's offices and two more buildings live, The Boss got nothing done. The last work done on the network and phone system prior to Friday were what I did with Jacques before I left. This meant that very little was ready, as Jacques and I only got about half of the necessary call flows set up due to half-assed flow charts and previously mentioned made-up acronyms.

One site in particular stood out on this. Jacques and I had made up our own basic call flows for the rest of them. Enough to make sure calls got to something with a pulse, anyway. This one site, however, is the red-headed step-child. A grant-funded program housed in the bad (OK, it's Buffalo, so a bad) area of town. They have no money. Most executives like to pretend they don't exist and wouldn't be able to find the office with a GPS. They ended up with no call flow.

How does this happen? Well, ask The Boss what he wants to set up for them and he'll tell you, "their phones were so shitty they'll be happy with whatever we give them."

The problem with this logic is that, while their old phones were indeed terrible, they rang when someone called the office.

Calls to their numbers would go to dead air during business hours, and dump to the main auto attendant after hours. This is what happens when someone enters a number in the system but doesn't provide information necessary to route the calls, you see. This went on all Friday afternoon and all day yesterday. Then the program director realized the phone hadn't been ringing.

This morning they at least have a basic call flow that rings actual phones and dumps callers to voicemail in the event nobody answers.

He didn't get any auto attendant prompts recorded, which he has been bragging for months about having professionally done. Oh, and don't get me started on the E911 mess he's made.