Two-person office forced to use a fancy phone system with hold music, so workers play the owner’s son-in-law’s terrible CD as muzak, and the requirement gets dropped as soon as a VP hears it

• Office Muzak

   

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• I was just talking to a former coworker and we had a good laugh about this. I worked for a company headquartered in a different state. My office had two people. Our phone system was someone answered the phone and if it was for the other person we put them on hold and yelled "phone" across the office. Or if I could see they were on the phone I would just take a message. This worked great, except that the HQ decided they didn't like that and bought the same fancy system they used.

• A little back story: The owner of our company was from a European company and they had a family bakery somewhere on eastern Europe. Every year for Christmas the company put in a huge order of these traditional cookies at the last minute. 

• Every year there were permits missed and import delays (with agricultural products, who would have guessed) and we got the cookies just in time. Then one of us would need to drive 4 hours to get our lot of the cookies.

• We weren't allowed to keep any for ourselves, but I had a governmental client that couldn't accept gifts, so we kept the box and tried them. These were the most awful cookies we had ever tried, it was like I just put the entire Sahara desert in my mouth and it sucked every drop of saliva out of my mouth and stale cardboard has more flavor. 

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• I couldn't believe we actually gave these to people. To eat. I suspect we were the only two people in the company to actually have tried these cookies.

• Well, one year the cookies didn't make it through customs in time. The owner's son-in-law was an aspiring musician. It turns out the owner tried to help this kid earlier in the year and paid for some recording time. The style and quality of the CD is pretty much what you'd expect at an open mic night at a coffee shop. The owner decided to make 100s of these CDs and give them to clients instead.

• We set up the new phone system as ordered and started our very own phone menu and voice mail maze for our customers. After a while one of us opened it up and saw there was a CD player for hold music. I listen to 1980s metal (Slayer is on the easy listening end) and my coworker listened to stuff that was... well weird. 

• So none of our personal stock would work. But guess what we had in the office supplies cabinet. Yep. Still had a few of those CDs left over, so I popped on in the CD player and now we had hold music. After all, is the phone system really set up without hold music?

• Then a vice president called. And was put on hold. They were a little more than upset by our music selection. Really? The company liked that enough to distribute to our clients, right? That is part of the phone system you wanted set up, right? 

• You don't what what I have on hand, right? You really really don't want what the other guy has on hand, right? The fall out was swift and immediate, we no longer were required to use all the features of the phone system and didn't need hold music, but needed to use the rest of the phone system.

• The solution to this sat in the supplies cabinet. Hundreds of CDs featuring the owner’s son-in-law’s aspiring musician career. These discs replaced the traditional Christmas cookies that tasted like stale cardboard dipped in Sahara dust. Both products carried the same energy. A family passion project distributed to clients as if quality was optional.

• TDLR: Forced to use new phone system at work. Put owner's son-in-law's horrible CD in as hold music. Told not to have hold music anymore.

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• This is a win story. A story of two workers who turned a terrible CD into a weapon against a terrible policy. The vice president heard the son-in-law’s coffee shop open mic quality and ended the hold music requirement. Sometimes the best rebellion involves following orders exactly as written and watching the system collapse under its own weight.

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