Lesson #7: Don’t dial 9 for an outside line at the cabin

I run a handful of websites as part of my job and hobby.  One of these sites controls the paging interface for nurses to get a hold of the doctors in the hospital.  Let’s see if I can give you an example…Well, lets say Johnny is having a heart attack on Station 20, and the nurse needs to get a hold of the doctor.  So, it is kind of an important web site.  The others are much less important.  The company that hosts the websites was bought by another company a few months ago.  So they had to move all of the web sites from the old company’s servers over to the new ones.  I called twice before this happened to let them know that there couldn’t be any time when the site was not working during the transfer. 

Paragraph two: nothing in paragraph 1 worked out as expected.  They moved the sites last Friday.  The sites stopped working Friday afternoon while I was driving to the cabin.  I spent my weekend on the phone with tech support getting the sites back up, and then they would crash again.  This went on for the next 7 days and made for one hell of a week.  So I talked to them on Thursday night and told them I had to get the site in a stable situation because I was going to the cabin for the weekend and couldn’t deal with this again from the cabin.  Sure enough, Friday night when I was eating dinner at the cabin, the site went down again. Surprise.

I now had the tech support phone# memorized from dialing it 40-45 times this week from the hospital.  I picked up the phone at the cabin, dialed 9-1…(I was trying to get an outside line like I was at the hospital, and dial a long distance number), then I realized I didn’t need to dial 9-1 so just started dialing the memorized number 1-877-228-3849.  It didn’t ring because I had dialed 9-1-1-877-228-3849.  I hung up and dialed 1-877-228-3849.  I was on the phone with tech support for the next 30 minutes.  The end result is that I moved my websites off their servers so I could relax and enjoy the weekend.  I hung up the phone, and as I walked back into the living room of the cabin, the sheriff came bolting down the road into the cabin.  The phone rang, Jessie answered, a woman on the other line asked “What is the emergency?”  Jessie said, “What?”  The lady said, “Someone called 911 thirty minutes ago, and we have been trying to get a hold of someone there for the last 30 minutes, but the line has been busy.”  Jessie asked if someone called 911.  Everyone said no.  The sheriff arrived, explained that he had just driven 30 miles at 80mph to get here.  It took him 35min though, so his math didn’t line up.  After everyone settled down a little, I realized that I had tried to dial an outside line from the cabin.  It was, however, a website emergency.  The sheriff didn’t think that was funny.  The website is working fine now, and I’m enjoying my Memorial Day weekend at the cabin.

Here’s the crew from the Rusk County Sheriff’s Dept