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enterprise-grade phone
Wednesday, April 15 2009
I was over at Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary for most of the day helping Doug (Mr. WFAS) install a enterprise-grade phone system. I've never in my life done this sort of work before, but I'd been requested to help because, presumably, I am known for having an intuitive sense of gadgets (and cats, though human beings are tricky). Business phone systems have whole functional blocks that are absent from household phone systems. This system, for example, was built around a white brick about the size of a fat housecat. This brick took outside lines and connected them to inside lines (which could take the form of conventional wired telephones or wireless handsets, to which it communicated with an accessory possessing rabbit ears). The wireless part of the system was based on the DECT 6.0 standard, a relatively new and improved wireless framework that Gretchen and I have happily adopted at our house.
Soon after I arrived Doug began to suffer a migraine episode, which only happens once every three months or so. Before its more painful symptoms manifested, it affected the center of his vision and made it difficult for him to read. Meanwhile I was trying to piece together a functional system there in the house as a proof of concept before attaching one of the rabbit-eared cellular points of presence down in the medical center. But I couldn't get the stuff to work, so Doug and I called tech support, which was a guy at the reseller who had bought the system from Panasonic and sold it on to WFAS. The great thing about this guy was that he picked up the phone after a ring and a half. The bad thing about him was that by the end of the today I knew far more than he did about this phone system. Take, for instance, the reason the system wasn't working at all. It turned out that this was because Doug had accidentally inserted an SD card into its slot upside down. But the tech support dude told us it must have been inserted correctly because the little door covering it had been able to close. After pulling the card out with needle-nosed pliers (the only way that worked) and flipping it over, the phone system worked perfectly. Then there was the confusion about how many wires were needed to get a phone extension (or a rabbit-ear-equipped cellular point of presence) to work. At first it seemed like it needed four, twice the number we'd initially thought, but then (after hearing the tech support guy flipping through pages and mumbling to himself) we finally learned that only two were required, but they were the outside pair on a conventional phone jack.
I did a few other technical things while I was there, mostly related to underperforming Windows XP installation. A little past noon Jenny prepared a delicious lentel-rice-and-cauliflower luncheon, which we ate out on the sundrenched stoop while sitting on rustic furniture made by a talented local racist. (Jenny and Doug hadn't learned that the furniture maker was a racist until after they'd already made their purchase and the guy told them, appropos of nothing, how he sure doesn't like African Americans.)
I had the dogs with me, and they behaved themselves well despite the presence of so many temptingly-chasable critters. Later in the afternoon, though, once there were no witnesses around, I saw Sally looking with interest at one of the goats, a half-grown doe with a healing broken leg named Fern. Sure enough, once she thought no one could see her, Sally gave chase. It was a lucky thing that I caught her and provided a stern rebuke (though I don't know that she would have actually attacked). For her part, Eleanor was on her best behavior, the idea of chasing chickens or goats as remote from her mind as the quadratic equation. The rabbits, safely in their pen, still interested her and I wouldn't have trusted leaving her alone with them. To a dog, even a saintly dog like Eleanor, a rabbit will never be anything but a prey species, a chew toy that runs.
At the end of the day, Doug and I took his and my dogs for a walk up Jessop Road, which ultimately dead-ends a mile and a half away at the residence of a notoriously-unpleasant video store mogul.
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