Engineers will be engineers...

In our building at work, they are replacing all of our conventional phones with brand new "Voice over IP" phones. For now, don't worry about what VoIP means. The only important thing for this post is that the phones are really cool, and have big, 7 x 10 cm graphical displays. There are lots of "soft" keys whose function is labeled on this nice, graphical display.

You can program many "speed dial" numbers in the phone. However, since this is a VoIP phone, you don't program this into the phone, but rather you go to a web site to do this. Here you enter your user id (which is our standard ID we use inside the company) and there is an initial preset password set to "12345".

You log into the web site, change the password, and then program your phone with your speed dial numbers. For each speed dial number, you can also give it a name that displays on the screen. Your first speed dial number is always displayed, and is activated by pressing the button to the right of it.

I programmed some numbers, changed my password, etc.

As it happens, this saved me!

Engineers, you see, like to play! And speed was of the essence, since most people had not used with their phones for the first time yet. So, guess what, since everyone's user IDs were known (they match our email addresses), the game of the day was to set someone ELSE'S speed dial number and the all important label which displays. Some of the favorites were:

• "Speakerphone"
• "Configure"
• "Redial"
• "Mute" and
• "Help"

When the victim walks up to their phone, of course all they see is this string - they never realize that someone actually set it to do something. Said victim may press the 'configure' key, only to find out that it calls the local pizza shop. Another favorite trick was to call your own phone - as it turns out, you can do it, and yes, its very confusing if you don't realize what you did.

And then there are the poor guys whose "new" password is being held for ransom, until the appropriate bribe is paid.