Gollum thought; telephony headaches
Dec. 10th, 2003 12:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI've spent part of the evening watching more of the documentaries on The Two Towers. There's some really great stuff here; I'm watching the one about Gollum now. It's an amazing piece of work, and a great paen to the power an actor has in terms of influencing a production and defining a character. The casting of, and the performance of, Andy Serkis pretty much caused Gollum to have to be redesigned from the bottom up...and improved Gollum dramatically over what he would have been if he'd just been a CGI character with an uninvolved actor doing a voice. Much is made of the director as the "auteur" of a picture...but things like this remind you that he's really more of an editor, and the actors and scriptwriters are the "authors" of the piece.
Today had its share of demon calls, and perhaps the worst of them was an account screwed up in a way that makes me wonder how it ever came into being in the first place. You see, when we move someone's phone numbers over to our phone company, we can only move phone numbers that are at the same physical location to one account...if a guy (or a business) owns phones in more than one building, even more than one suite within the same building, they have to be on separate accounts. Well, this one account somehow manages to have on it four numbers, two of which are from one location, and two of which are from another location in an entirely different city. There's no way in heck this account should even have been created in the first place...and now that it is, there's no way we can do any maintenance on or adjustment of half of the numbers on the account...because the address associated with those phone numbers in our computer has to match perfectly to their address in the ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, or "the local Bell company")'s computer system or the order rejects. And the ILEC has the correct address for those two numbers...whereas in our account, they're associated with the address of the other two numbers in the account, because we can only have one address per account. So when we try to do anything with those numbers, we send them down as belonging to Our Address...and since the ILEC knows they belong to Their Address, boom, reject.
The whole thing has me, my co-workers, and my supervisor all shaking our heads, because we can't figure out how the order even got to be like this in the first place—the order to move those numbers over to us should have rejected in just the same way as any maintenance orders to them will now. It's the telephonic equivalent of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And the damnedest part is that, according to my supervisor, the only way that it can be fixed...is for the guy to move his phone numbers back to the ILEC, then back to us. Our system does not offer us any way to split an account in the way that would have to be done to correct this problem...so essentially, it's a needle with a one-way eye. I'm not looking forward to having to call the guy back tomorrow to explain this.
Today had its share of demon calls, and perhaps the worst of them was an account screwed up in a way that makes me wonder how it ever came into being in the first place. You see, when we move someone's phone numbers over to our phone company, we can only move phone numbers that are at the same physical location to one account...if a guy (or a business) owns phones in more than one building, even more than one suite within the same building, they have to be on separate accounts. Well, this one account somehow manages to have on it four numbers, two of which are from one location, and two of which are from another location in an entirely different city. There's no way in heck this account should even have been created in the first place...and now that it is, there's no way we can do any maintenance on or adjustment of half of the numbers on the account...because the address associated with those phone numbers in our computer has to match perfectly to their address in the ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, or "the local Bell company")'s computer system or the order rejects. And the ILEC has the correct address for those two numbers...whereas in our account, they're associated with the address of the other two numbers in the account, because we can only have one address per account. So when we try to do anything with those numbers, we send them down as belonging to Our Address...and since the ILEC knows they belong to Their Address, boom, reject.
The whole thing has me, my co-workers, and my supervisor all shaking our heads, because we can't figure out how the order even got to be like this in the first place—the order to move those numbers over to us should have rejected in just the same way as any maintenance orders to them will now. It's the telephonic equivalent of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And the damnedest part is that, according to my supervisor, the only way that it can be fixed...is for the guy to move his phone numbers back to the ILEC, then back to us. Our system does not offer us any way to split an account in the way that would have to be done to correct this problem...so essentially, it's a needle with a one-way eye. I'm not looking forward to having to call the guy back tomorrow to explain this.
