Conference 7.286::digital

    If they'd like us to use DTNs instead of outside numbers (a fine idea),
    then the genius who decided to not allow DTNs on business cards ought
    to reconsider.
    
    I suggested this over a year ago in response to a request from our
    facility telecom to cut our telephone costs by 10%.  Never did get a
    reply...
    
    - Dave

    Anything that anyone writes or says will be misinterpreted by
    someone at some time.
    
    Work around:  There is none.  Go ahead and
    say it and hope for the best!  I am glad my son is in law school.
    
    Fred

>       <<< Note 959.1 by NSSG::SMITH "Dave - Networks & Technologies" >>>
>                              -< A suggestion... >-

A solution... 

>    If they'd like us to use DTNs instead of outside numbers (a fine idea),
>    then the genius who decided to not allow DTNs on business cards ought
>    to reconsider.

 I doubt they will. The powers be have decided it and that's that apparantly.
 What about two sets of business cards, one the same as is allowed at the
 moment, and another with 'For Digital Internal Use Only' written on them.
 Since the second are clearly only for use within Digital, could we not have
 DTN's (+ E-Mail addresses and mailstops etc) on these?

	Craig.

    There seems to be a new corporate "awareness" program concerning the
    proper use of our phone system towards saving money.  My supervisor
    received a cute colored flyer on this the other day.  One of the
    "suggestions" was a reminder to use 5-digit DTN extensions within your
    facility.  The other one that I recall that made me laugh out loud was
    something like [paraphrase]: when you hang up, remember to hold the
    switchook down for three seconds to be sure that you are disconnected;
    otherwise you may be charged for a conference call."
    
    (Let's not digress into another discussion about business cards,
    please.)

This was, of course, a totally unwarranted advertising program; a waste of
money itself!

In all of the facilities with five-digit numbering (the ones targetted for
the advertising program), we use SL100 PBXs.

We have programmed the routing tables in these SL100s so that any of the
following kinds of dialling will result in exactly the same routing and
exactly the same cost to the company:

	X-XXXX
    8 DTN-XXXX
    9 NXX-XXXX		For these two examples it is possible that calls between
8 A/C NXX-XXXX		Maynard and Acton may cost 11 cents each five minutes.

If the number is within your own facility, any one of the above four ways of
dialling the number results in EXACTLY the same internal action in the PBX.  In
the case of a call originating in any one of the four SL100s and destined for
any one of the other SL100s, with the sole exception of calls between Acton and
Maynard, the results for any of the last three methods will be the same.  We
could easily fix the Acton/Maynard discrepancy by adding about four more table
entries in each of those two locations.

Of course, the internal cost to carry the traffic on our lightwave network
between Acton and Maynard is comparable to the 11 cents per 5 mintues, and
the difference caused by the few people who might dial 9-264-7111 instead of
8-244-7111 over the next two years is less than these posters cost.

This was all caused by the fact that the internal billing program lets you call
a number in your own site using X-XXXX for free, but charges your cost center
(even though the cost to DEC is the same) if you dial 8-DTN-XXXX or 9-NXX-XXXX.

Bottom line:  There is no difference in the cost to DEC between dialling a
five digit extension in your own PBX and dialling it with any one of the three
possible prefixes.

/john

    I was told by one of our local telecom people that it was "cheaper" to
    call any of the sites in Dallas (from another Dallas site), by using 9+
    rather than 8+.
    
    Is our telecom billing system that screwed up?
    
    Bob

    Based on John Covert's .5, I'd say our internal telcom billing system
    is throughly screwed up.  From a cost center manager's point of view,
    it is cost-effective to run a poster campaign to change people's
    dialing habits, because it impacts his budget.  From the company's
    point of view, the posters are a waste of money, because changing
    dialing habits has no impact on the company's costs.
    
    We need to rationalize the internal telcom billing system so that cost
    center managers are motivated to save the company's money, not waste it.
        John Sauter

   RE basenote
    
   I thought the poster I read downstairs in Parker Street said
    
    	"We not asking you NOT to talk shop...."
    
              

    There is a large difference between the quote in .0 and that in
    .8.
    
    I would have interpreted .0 as a security message, ie. loose lips
    et al.   Whereas .8 is an appropriate reminder to those in facilities
    with alternate dialing methods.
    
    GET YOUR QUOTES RIGHT!
    
    Irv Waldo

>    < Note 959.9 by MORO::WALDO_IR >
>                              -< damn bum quotes >-
>
>    There is a large difference between the quote in .0 and that in
>    .8.
>    
>    I would have interpreted .0 as a security message, ie. loose lips
>    et al.   Whereas .8 is an appropriate reminder to those in facilities
>    with alternate dialing methods.
>    
>    GET YOUR QUOTES RIGHT!
>    
>    Irv Waldo

    
    Well, EXCUUSSSSSEEEEEEE ME, Irv!!
    
    I stand corrected on the quote -- it *does* say "We're not asking you
    not to talk shop".  But this just points out another problem with the
    design of the poster - it's too easy to mis-read it.  In English,
    anyway, we usually don't expect to encounter double negatives in
    sentences, even when grammatically correct.  Hence it is easy to get
    the opposite meaning than the one intended, especially since the double
    negative is not typographically highlighted.  As I said earlier, I
    wonder if posters ever get "field tested". 
    
    However, the previous replies bring out another aspect of this
    campaign, i.e. that it is a result of peculiarities of the phone
    billing system alone, not any real cost savings.  If this is true, it
    really is an unconscionable waste of resources. 

    Thanks for the clarification of the quote.  Double negatives are
    certainly unexpected and so very easy to misunderstand.  Just another
    example of the decline in communication skills which plauges us.
    
    Irv
    
    PS:  I really hate inaccurate rumors!

    What?
    
    "We're not asking you not to talk shop" is not a double
    negative -- the negatives are not mutually cancelling.
    The sentence doesn't mean anything close to the same
    same as "We're asking you to talk shop".
    
    The posters may be stupid, but syntactically they're ok.

    is the same group responsible for "screwed-up" telecom systems, the
    posters, and ELF V2?

    re: .13
    
    Either that, or the disease has spread farther than we thought :-(
    
    Bob

Re double negative: Strictly speaking it is not a double negative, but it is
a double negative in the sense that there are two negatives close together
in the same sentence. It's an unnatural construction and one that is easy to
misread, as we have already seen.
  By the way, the real message of the poster title is "You don't have to talk
about work the whole time you are on the phone, but please go easy on the idle
chatter."
  The switchhook message is badly written too. It doesn't mean that you, making
a regular call, could cause yourself to be billed for someone else's conference
call by hanging up "wrong". It means that if you are making a conference call
and don't hang up properly, you could be billed for time that you are not on
the line. Anyone who has an SL100 phone system quickly learns to hold down the 
button when hanging up because otherwise you get an irritating triple beep. I
think the same is true of home phones that have souped-up features.