Rob writes:
‘Jon’, a guy who should have retired about 10 years earlier, would make a habit of walking around the office and talking at (not to) all of his co-workers, essentially stopping work for the poor sap he was conversing with. By itself, this is relatively harmless, but he could-no-he would not disengage. AND, all topics, no matter what, would circle back to his involvement with a local social fraternity. Well, his social fraternity or gout. One of the two.
The IT department had such a great plan when this happened…someone would see Jon walk into a co-woker’s office. Then, another co-worker would call the victim. Jon, seeing that the person had to grab the phone call, would end the conversation immediately and then vulture for his next prey.
Then, we got caller ID.
Jon would see that I was calling Mark from the next office. Jon would come to my office and then my torture began.
Backfire!
One day, I was talking with Mark about a project I was working on – Jon came walking in and began chatting him up about the latest gout development. Mark was working away at his computer when his phone rang with a blank caller ID. As Mark said hello to the person on the phone, Jon walked out.
He hung up the phone with a smile on his face.
Mark wrote a program on the AS/400 to dial his number when he typed ‘decoy’ at the input line.
He got requests from the entire department to set them up with the same ability.
