I've just been hired (as a consultant) to implement edge firewalls for my customer who is getting new PIP and DIA circuits at all their sites.
I get invited to the usual weekly conference call with my customer and the carrier so I can get a sense of the larger scope of the project. Turns out they're on week 40 of the 12 week long project... normal, that happens all the damn time with all the carriers.
PM says everything should be good for the last turn-ups, then one of the engineers, a WAN guy, pipes up and asks to share his screen. He's prepared an excel sheet which kind of looks like the excel sheets that every PM from this carrier uses... its listing out all the problems at all the sites which are preventing him from being able to activate the circuits. He starts talking about how he built this sheet because there needs to be a PM on this project and someone needed to create a document that put it all in the same place. He's thanked well by the customer, because he's stepping up and throwing a flag against his own company.
Still sharing his screen, he brings up his internal teams app and starts sending messages to the PM: "Someone needs to step up on this account", "I won't take this anymore", "I'm going to management"... the PM says nothing. Not a word. I'm virtually certain that putting this on the screen share was entirely intentional.
I request copies of the current design documents from the PM (fat chance, right?), she says something about having to see who has them (I ask her to forward my request to the person running the project, which I can do since its my first call and I don't yet know its her). Then its back to complete silence so the engineer and the customer kind of close out the call with a "see you next week". And the call ends.
30 minutes. What a ride.
Who wants to share telecom conference call stories?
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