Being a Part of the PFM

Pure Friggin’ Magic refers to the mysterious events that resolve a problem, sometimes a huge outage , with no apparent action being taken by anyone . It is as if someone’s fairy godmother came down and sprinkled pixie dust on the network and suddenly it all returned to normal.

Remember PFM may indicate that someone secretly repaired an issue that he or she caused to begin with. This is actually more desirable than the other possible cause of PFM — an intermittent issue that will come back again soon. If the problem crops up again, deem it as an intermittent issue and troubleshoot it vigorously.

Tell your boss the following, “I don’t know what happened ! Our carrier and our hardware vendor swear they didn’t touch a thing to fix our problem. We seem to have had a case of PFM.”

Warning! If you work for a boss or organization that eschews swear words, don’t use this expression.

Getting Your CICs

The CIC (pronounced kik) is the four-digit number that your local carrier uses to identify your long distance network. This number is also part of the code you can dial if you want to use another long-distance carrier to make a call. For example, if you have MCI for long distance but want to use AT&T the next time you call London (maybe you heard that AT&T has a great network to the U.K.), you simply dial 10-10-288, plus the international phone number to complete your call.

Warning! If you do make a call over AT&T to London, and the number you are dialing from isn’t set up with AT&T, you may be charged a very extreme per-minute rate for that call. Don’t use another carrier’s CIC unless you are willing to pay up to $5 per minute for the luxury.

Tip When speaking to your local carrier to change the long -distance on your phone lines, say, “Please set up all of my lines to CIC 0333. I just signed up with Sprint and I don’t want to wait for the time it takes them to send the order to you.”

Chapter 17: Ten Troublesome Telecom Traits to Avoid

In This Chapter

Avoiding finger-pointing
Dealing with outages and credits
Dealing with fraud
Living with projects
Dealing with dementia
Calculating the cost of invoice inaccuracy
Threatening to sue

Every industry has its little list of pitfalls, and here are ten of the largest ones that you may find yourself dealing with during your adventures in telecom. They are all dangerous, painful, and surprisingly easy to find, so keep your eyes open and try to avoid them.

Finger-Pointing Your Way into a Corner

You don’t like to be told you’re wrong. Heck, no one does — especially carriers and hardware vendors . There are many variables in telecom, and although you may think you’ve isolated a problem and can pinpoint its source, you may want to avoid doing so. There is always a quirky possibility that a problem you find in one location may be the result of something wrong in a seemingly unrelated part of the network.

If you sound too sure that you know what a problem is, and who is to blame, a tense situation can quickly deteriorate into a series of verbal attacks and pointed words. If your troubleshooting team is at odds with each other, you are doomed to either failure or a very dicey bit of diplomacy that makes the Mid-East peace talks look like a cakewalk .

Tip If emotions run high, end the troubleshooting, separate the people that are fighting and adopt a diplomatic stance.