Phones

Melbourne was great. We did lots of touristy things, went out to eat, and I was strough (contraction of strong and tough) enough to chaperone some power shopping. We met up with our American friend Nicole too and she was great company. You'll get all the details and pictures in a future post.

Now for the inspiration behind this post: phones and the noises they make. At one point in my life I attended graduate school in the mornings and answered phones for a living all night. I was doing tech support and answered the phone tens of times each shift. And nobody was calling to tell me how well their equipment was working. They all had problems and high-stress levels and wanted me to share the emotions they had. Answering the phone wasn't great, but I really hated that little red voice mail light. Long meandering monologues about their problems that they could have relayed to the next available tech support agent.

At school, I was studying Telecommunications and gaining deep insight in the engineering, business, and legal methods though which the phone companies were screwing us all. Together with my job, I developed a severe aversion to phones. I cancelled my home phone and refused to get a mobile phone. I had broadband and could email or IM with anyone from home or work, but if you wanted to talk to me, you had to call me at work. When I had to call someone, I would do it at work and planned my life accordingly.

After dating for a while, Perin didn't care for my arrangement and eventually convinced me to get a mobile phone. Having done research into the mobile operators, I was paralyzed attempting to choose the least-evil provider. It couldn't be done: they were all really evil. I eventually relented and chose one. People could call me on it, but I refused to check voice mail.

Time heals all wounds. Two years after graduation and leaving that job, I could force myself to check my voice mail when it would get to around 10. And now I don't despise checking voicemail, and I can check it each time I get one, but I still dislike it.

And at the same time, I've become the ultimate sell-out. I work for the phone company now. Technically, I work for a subsidiary of the phone company selling/doing computer stuff, but I work with people who sell "communication solutions" including phones, mobile phones, and phone plans.

Or course, I still dislike the sounds of phones ringing. I always try to set my phone to minimal ring sound. A single ping or something like that. I leave my phone on vibrate pretty much all the time. However, working with this team of phone salespeople means they're always getting new phones and tend to be too lazy to change the default sounds. So when one phone rings, they're all "Is that me? Is that you? Who's is that?" Same thing for reminders, and email, text, and voice mail alerts.

This makes me appreciate the exceptions a little more though. The 50-year-old lady next to me has the Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow song which is a nice change (also she doesn't get too many calls which I'm sure helps). But the best is going to visit the Unix and development teams. Those nerds have no problem changing the default noises the computers and phones in their lives make. Standing over there before one of their team meetings starts is like the noisiest SciFi set ever. Everyone's computers and phones alerting them is a cacophony of bosun's whistles, phaser noises, light sabres, R2D2 noises, and a lot pneumatic door noises. The best.