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Dec 13Call Me, Maybe
by in Feature Articles on 2014-01-22The problem with helpdesk ticketing systems is there's rarely anywhere to file a ticket about them, but that didn't stop the users of WTF U's incident management system from raising hell when their new staff cellphone numbers caused this error:
Like all diligent university procurement departments, WTF U's had carefully considered their approved list of Highly Paid Consultants and then hired two of their own Computing Science majors to develop the Integrated Departmental Incident Outcome Tracker, rolled out with slight customizations to all university departments. Being in Greater London, the values entered in the phone number field had always been ten digits long and in the 020 local exchange — the leading zero being dropped when interpreting the number as an integer. The campus IT department, pursuing their mandate of never leaving anything bloody well alone, had recently rolled out mobile phones to their technicians so they could be harassed by professors whilst on vacation. UK mobile numbers begin with 07 followed by nine digits, and as soon as a tech tried to enter his new number in the tracker, he was confronted by the foregoing error.