Much Needed Amusement at Work

As most of you know, I work for Graduate Studies at BYU. During the summer, it is notoriously slow, especially when the full-time staff are at a conference and it's only the student and other part-time employees. I'm not saying that we don't work, but we have to get pretty creative sometimes to make up a project to keep busy. We can't really cut down our staff all that much because we all do have assignments, they just rely so much on the full-timers that when they are gone, it can be a bit rough. Wednesday afternoon was one of those afternoons. Fortunately, fate seems to see our misfortune and creates amusement every once in a while. What I'm going to attempt to explain has happened four times in the last year and it baffles us every time. There is no explanation.

On Wednesday it all began when the front desk phone started ringing. I looked down at the caller ID and it said it was the front desk's number calling itself. Odd. Shortly thereafter our data analyst got a phone call on his cell phone that showed the front desk number was calling him, despite the fact that no one was on the phone. He answered and after a moment of silence it started ringing as if he were calling someone. Then my cell phone started ringing. I look down to see that it is also showing that the front desk is calling me, but obviously that's not true. I didn't answer it and then Curt heard my voicemail and actually left me a message. Various scenarios of this type happened for about an hour. People's cell phones called the front desk, and then when someone picked up, it would ring to another person's cell phone under the first person's number. Never does it show on the phone that starts the cycle that a call was made. It's just weird. The first time it happened last year it was initially between Verizon phones so we called customer service (you can imagine their confusion), but then phones on Tmobile and land lines also began to do similar things. We've tried searching the internet to see if it happens to anyone else, but to no avail.

We were naturally suspicious as to who might be messing with us. We originally thought it might be the data analyst, but he can't figure it out. We also suspected the webmaster or publications intern, but both were out on Wednesday and were doing things that wouldn't have allowed them to spend time creating havoc. Of note, it only involves cell phones that are in the office, and generally only rings to office phones where people are working; it didn't involve any of the staff that were at the conference or out for other reasons. So, since that seems to limit how an outside person could be involved, and we've checked with IT and they can't seem to find anything behind it (although they would love to figure out how to do it), we've come to the conclusion that it's got to be some signal issue with our building. We are moving offices within the week so I'll let you know if it happens again...in some ways I hope it does. It provides much needed amusement on those slow afternoons.