Chris had finally put the VoIP saga behind him—or so he thought. The system had been running smoothly for months, the sales team had stopped threatening to mutiny, and even Debra had begrudgingly admitted, “These phones aren’t completely terrible.”
Then, one morning, his inbox lit up like a Christmas tree.
Subject: URGENT – PHONES DOWN
From: Literally Everyone in the Office
Chris groaned and rolled his chair toward the server room, already dreading what he’d find. Sure enough, the VoIP server was blinking in an ominous, not-quite-dead-but-definitely-suffering way.
Inner Thought #1: Please don’t be as bad as I think it is. Please just need a simple reboot.
One reboot later… nothing.
Chris dove into troubleshooting, running diagnostics while the complaints rolled in:
- “I can’t make calls!”
- “The voicemail system just plays elevator music on repeat!”
- “My phone keeps ringing, but no one’s there!”
After two hours of hair-pulling, he traced the issue to a mystery update pushed by the VoIP vendor overnight. Apparently, someone had decided to “improve” call routing, which instead had caused every single call to be forwarded to accounting.
Inner Thought #2: If I quit now, do I have enough savings to live in the woods?
By noon, he had a workaround in place, reconfiguring the settings manually for every single extension in the building. At one point, Barry from sales leaned over his desk and whispered, “Why not just use Zoom?”
Chris didn’t answer. He just stared at Barry until he backed away.