How I Roll With the Red Phone

Many of us know that bizarre, impractical, and blatantly silly ideas often come from working in large companies. We all know how these come about. Some magical person with a fancy-pants title imagines that some less-magical person with a regular-pants title needs some extra step in their day to perform their job more efficiently. The former, hereafter known as "The Man," usually has his magical head crammed straight through his fancy-pants and into his Butt of Wisdom.

So, there's this phone at my desk. It's a red phone. It's red because it is the "emergency" phone. The idea being that if it ever rings, we drop what we're doing and answer it because, um, it's probably an emergency. I can understand why this might seem like a good idea to The Man. Emergencies are generally considered to be important.

It's sort of been an odd fixture on my desk for the past 3 years. It's never rang. Not once. There have been emergencies, but it turns out that people tend to dial "911" for those. Go figure. So I was only moderately surprised when the tech guy came down to rewire the desk a few weeks ago and asked me why we had a big red phone that wasn't plugged into anything.

Eh?

That's right. Not plugged in. Turns out that the phone is somehow not compatible with our super crazy phone system. That's right. It's *never* been plugged in. It's been nothing more than a shiny red paperweight for over 3 years. Surely, you say, someone would have noticed! Anyone who dialed the magical "emergency" extension, 5555, would have let us know that it goes nowhere! Except that as it turns out, *we* were the only ones who were told what the extension was.

Oh! And to further the drama, I just dialed 5555. It goes to another phone entirely.

Some people find fulfillment in their jobs when they save lives, I find it when discovering useless protocals and making fun of them. Am I bitter that The Man makes so much more than me? Of course not. The sense of intellectual superiority is all the compensation I need.