When Your Work Around Needs a Work Around

Our company recently switched telecom providers, going from one digital service to another, supposedly less expensive provider (keep that point in the back of your mind). Haply, all the employees turned-in their desktop phone instruments and began using telephone service through their individual desktop computers with wired and/or wireless headsets.
Alexander Graham Bell’s head would probably explode.

In my little corner of the office, literally, there is the studio wherein we produce our daily Radio show, complete with live-streaming on YouTube, and occasionally, a guest interview or two by phone. That phone system is managed by a Comrex STAC device that had worked very well with our previous telephone service provider, but apparently ran afoul of the new guys’ system for no good reason that was offered to me. Their solution was to “stick with the old provider,” but to buy the new guys’ service as well.
What a wonderful sales pitch.

And for a period, that’s what it seemed we were going to do. I would occasionally check the phone line for a dial tone and be comforted by the dual pitch tone buzzing in my ear.
Until it didn’t.

Today we learned the phone number assigned to our Studio gear had been mistakenly ported-over into the new system, effectively cancelling the working service on that line. There’s no going back, and there’s no going forward, since the new guys say they cannot integrate the Comrex unit into their system. 

My work-around is to take calls into the show via the phone system that’s in place at our host Radio station, and pipe them into our audio stream through our remote connection.
Except…AT&T seems to have severed the phone lines for our Radio partner.

What do you do when your work-around needs a work-around?
Stay-tuned, as they say, for the outcome.
But don’t even think of calling-in now; operators are not only not standing by, they don’t care, and they’ve apparently left the building.