Once upon a time there was one glasblower, one phone and one number.
A little while later, a second glassblower arrived. Shortly after his arrival, there was a small argument resulting in a second phone and a second number.

Time passed.

Last year, I strolled onto the scene and used the first phone without so much as a ‘by your leave’. The first glassblower wasn’t there much, so they didn’t complain. Although to be honest, I don’t think they even noticed.

…

The story would have probably stagnated about here…

…except that at some point between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, the powers that be turned both our phones off at work.

No one said anything to us about it, it just happened and we noticed it once it had finished happening.

Three days and several emails to The Phone Man later, a very jovial chap appeared in the workshop and installed two shiny new phones.

***

One would think new phones ought to be much the same as old phones but these weren’t. They have close to 3000 buttons (give or take a few) compared to the 12 the old ones had for a start, some have pictograms and others even change their function depending on what else you’ve pressed.

Obviously we had to try them all out 🙂 (in that respect, and in many others, I am very grateful for my colleague – he says he hates technology, but gets quite excited by the prospect of pressing buttons to see what happens).

We each have a private number and share the workshop number. We can switch between the two so we can decide if we want to call on behalf of ourselves or the workshop.

We can’t just talk to people (how boring would that be?!), we can now look up their numbers, find out how many people share our names (13 and 16 respectively), redirect all calls, redirect a specific call (“oh, you want to talk to Mr Soandso, hang on, I’ll put you through”), turn the microphone off (“psst, it’s that idiot again – are you here?!”) or the speaker on, add people to the conversation or put people on hold.

We can see who phoned who and when.

We can choose from 30 ring tones, 8 volumes and a dozen background pictures (this is a landline phone, remember?).

We can place requests for the phone to let us know when people are available and we can let them know they should phone back if they aren’t.

It’s quite exciting really.

It took us almost an hour with both phones and my mobile to figure it all out – now all we need to do is wait for someone to phone us!