So, in the end, we won. Rich passed me an email from Fonality telling us that we can still have access to the server, etc. How gracious of them. To bad it almost had to come to blows before the situation got ironed out.

Since I’ve been in this office, there has been an item on my to-do list that says “figure phone system out.” We’re hooked up through Fonality. Ok. At least one, two, maybe even all of these guys have degrees in engineering of some kind. My first thought, “This shouldn’t be so hard to figure out!”

Little did I know.

My first task was to update the time and date on the phone display. After about a week with the phones flashing DEC 31 5:00PM, I was done feeling like Christmas was forever far away, and never getting closer. I ended up calling the local vendor who never answered the phone, and then tried the supplier directly. I finally got someone on the phone (who for some reason kept quoting Ace Ventura, Pet Detective) but was redirected to the website to correct server myself. I don’t have an engineering degree, but I am a smart girl and have experienced reasonable success in the past with time/date settings, extension organization, and voicemail setup and maintenance. The website that supposedly organizes our phone system is SO SO SO SLOW. It takes forever for it to load, and half the time feeds me an error message, saying “server temporarily unavailable.” I did exactly what was asked of me (2, maybe 3 times) and when I got no results finally got a guy on the phone who repeated the steps I had taken to no avail. Finally, he wrote me an email saying that there is nothing he can do on his end.

In my phone conversations with the people at Fonality I find out that our local vendor is on the lam! It was just a rumor in the beginning, but apparently he hasn’t made good on the deal he made with Fonality in the first place, and a whole set of new problems exploded in our faces. Fonality’s big beef is that they remain “unpaid for our system,” which is hysterical, because Rich definitely paid the contract price in full to get the system up and running. So whose fault is it that the vendor ran off to Mexico, or wherever?

Making it official, Fonality sent us an email telling us that our phone system would not be shut down, but that they would simply like to make us a direct customer. All was well and good until we got another letter saying that unless more money was paid, the major functions (if you can even call them that) would be shut down unless we contracted with them before May 10^th. In essence, they were asking us to repurchase a phone system that we already bought.

Rich called a few different people to try to ameliorate the situation, but was written off by both the Vice President and the Manager of Customer Service, Michael Smith. Mr. VP actually said, “Tough.” Interestingly enough, Ace Ventura aside, the Manager of Customer Service was the most caustic and disrespectful employee of them all!

Ron Porter, who set up the Premium Services Team at Novell overheard the conversations and said that this had to be one of the most horrific examples of customer service that he had experienced in his lifetime. The customer service manager appeared to have been fed language directly from his attorney, being ever so careful to be able to declare plausible deniablity on any subject. His favourite statement was “We’re not taking your phone system down, it will continue to work.” The problem with that is, without the server, our phones are about as useful as lilypads. $500 lilypads. When we asked about the voicemail, the after hours service, or how we would monitor the extensions, he just replied, “Now, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?” Finally he said, “Well you could sue us, but we suggest you go after the vendor.”

Thanks, Fonality.