My boss told me the other day we have to cut telecommunications spending in our company by about 50%. To figure out exactly where all of the money was going, yesterday I compiled a spreadsheet of all the information from our cell-phone bills, to find out how much money we’re spending on each person, how many minutes we’re buying for them, and how many of those minutes they were using.
The Verizon bills were handy because after each phone number there was the name of the person using the phone. The T-Mobile bills, however, lacked that feature. I was able to use the Blackberry Enterprise software to find out which users were attached to which devices, but there were still a bunch of numbers on the T-Mobile bills for whom I couldn’t find a user, even though the phones were clearly being used by someone, as evidenced by the activity on the bill. Today, I took a list of phone numbers for which I could not find users, and sent each one of them an SMS text message, telling them to reply with their name or else I’d cancel that line of service. So I spent a good half an hour going through this list of cell phone numbers and sending out that text message.
To the outside observer, I looked busy. However, I could easily have been sending text messages to my friends like those guys who bag your groceries at kroger, and I still would have looked ‘legitimately’ busy. If I was just sitting there, texting away on my cell phone, the case might have been different. Having that spreadsheet in front of me, to which I would occaisionally make changes, was sufficient to imply to anyone watching me that I was most likely doing somethign buisness related instead of something entirely personal (like writing on a blog, for example.)
I wonder, now, what exactly what steps would be necessary to convey a ‘legitimate’ air to completely personal activities undertaken while on the job. When you’re on the phone, it generally looks like you’re busy and talking to someone important, so even if you’re calling your hair stylist to set up an appointment (for example) it could look like you’re calling to get important stuff done. The same is true with a blackberry – if I’m looking at a blog on my computer it’s obvious what I’m doing, but if I look at the same blog from my blackberry, it looks like I’m reading important documents or something. Especially if I frown at it.
Hmm. Just something (among many other things) for me to think about.