ILLEGAL

The college got a completely new phone system at the beginning of this week, complete with new phones, new features, new procedures, and new annoyances.

My first annoyance is missing training and having no documentation. The training sessions were held last week while I was on vacation. As I don't have documentation, I'm not sure how to transfer calls and I don't know what all the specially programmed buttons mean or do.

But my second annoyance (admittedly minor, but persistent) is it's insistence that it is "illegal" if I'm not the first one to hang up from a call. If the other person hangs up first (and in a few other cases), the screen on the phone flashes "ILLEGAL", beeps at me, and then re-sets the phone to be ready for another call.

I mentioned it to Tim in tech and he said it has to do with how long the receiver has been off the hook. He's wondered himself if there is some way to disable that portion, but it's not high on the priority list.

I'm thinking this is an example of a programmer not thinking about user interface. It wouldn't have been that hard to change the output to "Phone off of Hook" or something like that. I still might've been annoyed by the obviousness of it, but I would've known what it was complaining about and not felt like it was accusing me of breaking the law.