Can you hear me now?

Can you hear me now?

Actually ... no.

AKA - a peek into my job.

Those commercials where the guy is walking around asking "Can you hear me now?" have a huge ring of truth for me. I work with those guys.

Sort of.

They don't usually walk around like that. They drive. Unless checking a public pedestrian place, like a stadium or convention center.

They're not usually talking on the phone like that. They have special phones that make and measure the calls automatically.

But sometimes they are just talking and saying the equivalent of "Do you hear me now". I've been working with one of those cases since noon today. In several scattered spots around the country.

Oh yeah, what do I do? I get to try to figure out what's wrong when they can't "hear me now". At least from the switch side of things. There are lots of places the problem could be. So I get on conference calls and instant message with people who are covering other aspects of the network. And login all over creation checking log files to see what's happening. And, if I find a bug in our system, follow up with our developers to fix the code.

Oh, and my main customer isn't the "Can you hear me now" folks. It's the "Fewest call drops" folks. So, I spend a lot of time making sure their advertising stays true. But today wasn't drops, it was "can you hear me?". I'm still on a conference call, listening and waiting for a command to finish while I type.

Oh, and today was day 3714. Tomorrow is Day 1.

Day 3714, and final, of Lucent. Day 1 of Alcatel-Lucent.