My work finally introduced IP telephones to all offices. Seems to work just fine after a few days of configuring the servers and so on. The quality is good and there are new features.
Everything is fine and dandy. Well, except when I found out about the headset solution. I would have figured that you just bought a fitting headset to plug into the phone, but no. Reality is much scarier.
See, when one of my colleagues finally got his headset, it turns out that the new IP technology phone wasn’t prepared for headsets. Makes sense, eh?
To compensate for this lack of foresight among the phone designers, they decided to solve the problem Lego Creator style. No high-tech Mr. Spook stuff from this phone producer. No way.
Here’s a picture (is it just me, or does it look like a 5 year old Motorola trying to mate with the stationary phone?):
The fix turned out to be a mechanical solution to the technical problem. Way more strange than one would have thought. They put a tiny “robot” on the side of the phone.
So how it works, is:
When you take the headset from it’s cradle, the robot moves it’s little arm and lifts the handset out of it’s cradle. Taaadaaa we got tone! Apparently this is the only way it could be solved now that we already bought the phones.
Sometimes reality turns out to be scarier than fiction.
Here’s a short video of the robot in action just to show you I’m not imagining things Sometimes the avi doesn’t work. Solution: download the avi and play it locally.
Sorry for the Parkinson/Dogma style camera controlling. I must have been laughing when I shot the movie.
Haha, interesting. What kind of company do you work for?
Sent you an email ;-)
Better keep work and private life apart to a certain degree.
I understand :)