I work for a 24/7/365 manufacturing company, and I'm one of the "lucky" ones who has to be on call whenever the manufacturing group needs "assistance". Up until this month, The Company has reimbursed us $45/month towards our personal cell phone bill. Which is pretty excellent! I've got an iPhone, cause I'm a total techno-geek. My minutes are pretty much evenly split between calling my mom and getting called by work.
But then "someone" looked at who was getting reimbursed at work, how much they were getting back and who had company issued blackberries and determined there was an "issue". Cell phone reimbursements would stop immediately and everyone below associate director level was going to have to reapply for a phone/blackberry. Cell phones would be issued only if it was mission critical and if you want to move your personal number to the issued phone, The Company would own your cell number by the end of the year.
So, everyone supporting manufacturing submitted their requests. One group got shot down outright. My group, after a 5 month delay, got our high tech Nokia 6301's. As you can see from the photo, it looks like a slide phone... nope, looks like it might flip open to reveal a qwerty keyboard, nope... looks like its a shiny version of the Nokia I bought in 1999... BINGO!
I tried texting, took me 3 minutes to get the word "beer" to appear. Apparently 2337 should be "adds". And it wasn't exactly intuitive how to rotate through the words. (yes, my first text on a work phone was "when are we going for beer").
Anyway, the extended period of time of text, the fact that I can't just magically beam my work contacts to the phone, its not completely customizable and, well, isn't a smart phone has made me realize that, to me, a cell phone is about as useful as a cassette player.
And work thinks a bunch of engineers are going to give up their iPhones and Blackberries for this... that just cracks me up!
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