I’ve been having an interesting week. I’m responsible for our company’s phone system, and we just changed long distance carriers. This always seems like a good idea until we actually try to do it. You see, we have something like 38 phones like the one shown here hooked up to two PBXs at two different locations, connected by a T1 line. Regular calls come into each of them via their own set of Centrex phone lines. But outbound long distance and inbound toll free calls are handled by a dedicated long distance T1 that provides 16 inbound and 8 outbound voice channels over two pairs of wire.

When we hooked up the new T1 Monday night, it seemed to be working perfectly, but all day yesterday and today, we’ve been losing calls, and being the call center for a mail order catalog, that is not good.

So now I’m caught in the middle between a phone vendor who says it must be the carrier and a carrier that says it must be our equipment, and I don’t have the knowledge or skills to determine whether the rock’s right or the hard place.

But the icing on the cake? Yesterday I came down with a fairly serious case of pink eye, and I feel like crap, and I’m sitting here picking boogers out of my eyes while I wait for one of the phone guys to show up… wish me luck!