999, what is your emergency?… Oh sh-
On Call The weekend is approaching, dear readers, but before we get there, our weekly column of tech support drama beckons.
And this week’s On Call is certainly dramatic as “Brandon” tells us about a tense phone call with a user who was, quite literally, in at the deep end.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” Brandon began, with just a hint of melodrama. “Well, it was dark at the very least.”
Our tech support chap was on call one night in the early ’90s when he received a “999” pager code.
“Even though the severity level was scalable, calls late at night always seemed very urgent to the lonely souls toiling in the white-noise of the data centres,” he said.
So Brandon had this in mind when he called the number back, and ended up speaking to a woman who sounded “quite panicked”.
Down the phone line he could hear “the unmistakable roar of air rushing loudly, as was typical when you call into a data centre” – but there was something else he couldn’t place.
