We also have crappier chairs

my new phone



the fancy phones, but the ones in my office have a lovely photo taken from a parking lot.


I think it's entirely appropriate that my last post about work (a year and a half ago) was about my phone, because today we got new phones in the office. We were warned, however, that they weren't "going live" until May, and until then, we could only receive calls on our old phone. Unless someone called from one of the new phones. Such was the joke all day when someone would call. "You're supposed to call me on the new phone!!" "Ooops, sorry."[click] This was especially fun because our new phones come with a kajillion different ringing options ("ring tones" as the kids call them). Everything from "saxophone 1" to "chirp 2" to "CTU-24," which sounds exactly like the phones...well, in CTU on 24.

It wasn't long until we bottom-dwellers began to notice that our bosses had different phones than us. Equipped with a touch-screen with a gorgeous photo of one of our retail stores on it, these symbols of our corporate caste system seem to have no different features than our own phones. Though the Cisco website does note that while our phones are considerd "entry-level," (it actually says that) the fancy phones, ""provide a high degree of flexibility for exciting new productivity applications." Oooo.

Honestly, I'm not sure I want one of the Executive phones, even though (according to the internet) theirs cost $600 and mine only cost $200. Even my lowly one, with all its special features, makes me feel old. "I don't need all this technology!" I grumble, as my LCD-screen informs me that I have a voicemail and an mp3 of the message appears in my email inbox. I don't even know how it did that. And it opens in iTunes, where I keep old David Bowie songs and my entire Radiohead collection.

But that doesn't mean I'm not going to try to figure out how to get a picture of my ass on every phone in an office with a door.