A Non-Rage Post

It was bound to happen eventually...

It's funny story time.

Several years ago, before my company was acquired by Descartes, our phone system was supplied by a company called Siemens.  Remember that.  It's important.

We had our bi-weekly manager's meeting today, which are rather entertaining.  It pretty much gives us the opportunity to bitch and complain about our employees and our bosses without worrying about offending anyone, because all us managers know each other and are friends.  The topics tend to spiral well out of control, as was the case today.

We're migrating to a new e-mail server.  As such, our IT department is slowly migrating each individual employee from the old domain to the new one.  It's no big deal -- mine was migrated last week without any problems.  Well, apparently, today someone nearly lost all of the data on their computer when the migration was done to their system.  This, naturally, cause a rant by our boss Ed, who couldn't understand (rightfully so) how switching -EMAIL SERVERS- could cause the data on someone's hard drive to be lost.  (IT did end up getting it back.  It was a weird situation.)

Anyway, this led into other complaints about our company's IT -- to include shitty network performance, slow response times, and finally, the current phone system.  We were talking about how dialing into a conference line was sometimes hit or miss with this system, and that it can get very frustrating.  Just today, Ed had to perform a software demo to a potential customer using his Blackberry's speaker phone, instead of his office phone, because the office phone couldn't dial into the conference line for some unknown reason.  And needless to say, the speaker phone on a Blackberry leaves much to be desired in terms of audio quality.

After Ed had finished explaining the phone problems, Bernie shook her head and said, "Siemen was good."

I'm not sure anyone else caught it at first.  I instinctively snickered, which caused everyone else to realize what she'd just said.  Then there was this domino effect of facepalms all around the table, followed by much laughter.  After which I said, "Of course, Bernie.  But we were talking about the phone system."

It should be noted that it would have sounded a whole less funny if she'd actually pronounced the name of the company -correctly-.  (Siemens)

A little while later, she sends an e-mail to Danielle and I with a link to the company's website, saying, "Check out what else Siemens makes!"  It turns out they also make some kind of orbiter nuclear camera.

So I replied with, "A phone company that also makes those?  That's a little hard to swallow."

Yes, I am the master of cheap puns.

I have one word for you: