Bodging my way through life

I'm currently subcontracting at a large government contractor, and I seem to have phone issues. The phone is a Cisco IP phone. For a few months, it would occasionally go into an "I can't boot" mode for a day or so. Or it would start madly dropping packets during a conversation, making the audio choppy and unintelligible. I reported this, and was eventually told that this was a known problem, all the phones did this, and they were waiting for a software update that would fix it.

Well, last month the software update got installed. Whereupon my phone went into it's "I can't boot" mode, and stayed there.

It's still there. They've replaced the wire, replaced the phone, reset the system, all to no avail.

Then they told me they were out of phone IP addresses and would have to wait until another division can come and reprogram the phone switch to get more IP addresses.

At first, I accepted this, but then I started thinking about it. The phone switch doesn't hand out IP addresses, the DHCP server does. And that's not the problem anyway, the phone (eventually) gets an IP address. And if they were out of IP addresses, nobody could get new phones, and they're bringing on new people all the time.

Then I saw the address on the email: [email protected].

Eit.