This one reminded me of our first experience at converting to VOIP.

When the day arrived to start replacing the 40 year old phone systems in our stores (due to replacements for broken phones costing $300 each, refurbished, at best, with a 50/50 chance they'd work), we talked to our phone (and internet) company about what was available. They were transitioning from providing analog service (over the internet, but converted on-site) to VOIP. OK, makes sense, it's the right choice.

But they were new to VOIP, and still getting a handle on how to make things work the way the customer wants, and most of their customers are offices, not brick & mortar retail. They don't know what we need, and we don't know what to ask for. OK, we'll work with them on that. They've always taken pretty good care of us. (Not the cheapest, by any means, but reliability is more important to us, because without the computers, we've got about 3 days offline before it all starts to fall apart.)

The problem was, the phones they sold us came out of the box configured for an office. The receptionist's phone rings, they answer, and transfer the call to the person it's for by extension number. Retail stores don't work that way. We need all phones to ring, be able to pick up the call anywhere, put it on hold, pick it up from another phone, lather, rinse, repeat as the associate runs around the store answering questions.

On the old phones, this is one button to put a call on hold, and one button to pick it up from any phone. The default way to do this on the new phones involves multiple buttons (including a four digit extension number) to park the call, and an equal number of buttons to pick it up. (And there's a button marked "Hold" that actually puts the call on hold - but it can only be picked up on the same phone.) Needless to say, this won't fly, even with a running start from a tall cliff. They knew this going in.

So they configured the phones to move the call to a park line with two buttons, and pick it up from any phone with two buttons. Worked . . . Okay, if not ideal. Except it relied on a feature that was deprecated, and when they did a software upgrade, it disappeared.

Then they found another way to do the same thing, but with three or four buttons. Not ideal at all, and it tended to result in dropped calls. And the particular store we converted first is in a beach city full of people rich enough to live at the beach, but not rich enough to live in the very rich beach city next door, which makes them . . . cranky. These people won't call back to finish their call, they will call back to scream obscenities at you. The only reliable way to put calls on hold such that they could be picked up on a different phone was the "official" way involving waaaay too many buttons. Plus, it also relied on a deprecated feature, and was never going to have the bugs addressed.

One of the cashiers - who has been with the company for a couple of decades and was the best they had for working with customers - simply refused to answer the phone. And her manager didn't blame her. The manager (also one of our best) was ready to quit over it. And we didn't blame him.

So a conversation was had, between me, who makes all the technical decisions, my boss, who has signature authority, our account rep (who was sympathetic, but had the technical savvy of a turnip), a senior VP from the phone company, and the lead technical guy for the phone company. It started off with my boss telling the VP "You have 30 days to make this work the way we want, or we're finding a new phone company." We were, at the time, about a quarter million dollar a year account (we're more now). Not their biggest, by any means, but big enough to get their attention. (Our account rep told me he had bigger accounts, but not many, and not by much. He was very concerned. I believe his bonuses were heavily based on total revenue generated.)

Took 'em two weeks, but they discovered some kind of macro feature ("key system emulation"?) that let them reprogram the buttons to do the complicated sequence to move the call around. One button to put a call on hold, one button to pick it up anywhere, and it worked (and we got CallerID to boot!) almost exactly like the old phones. Only difference was it was a different button to pick up the call than to put it on hold. I requested the tech guy write detailed instructions on how he did it and include it in the records for that store, so that I could refer future project engineers to that when we got to other stores. And he did, and I believe they still use those instructions to this day. And we're not their only brick & mortar customer these days, either.