Batphones and boneheads. That's the theme for this evening. I was on a conference call with my boss in my office, with the door closed and had the phone on speaker. We're right smack dab in the middle of the call with a client when my cell phone rang. It was buried in my briefcase on the floor in the corner. I dug it out flipped it open and immediately shut it. Well, by god, it immediately rang again, so I figured I'd just flip over the briefcase to muffle the noise a bit (the ring volume was pretty low to begin with) and let it go to voice mail. Four rings went by and it stopped, so I figured voice mail got it. Apparently not, because moments later it started ringing again, and I whipped my coat off the back of my chair and tossed it on top of the briefcase to further muffle the noise, and it stopped after four rings. Put the speakerphone on mute and told my boss "unless somebody just died, there's no excuse for that during office hours--other than myself only half a dozen people even have my cell number, and they know not to call during office hours." Took the speakerphone off mute, and we finished the client call.

Half an hour later the "batphone" in the hallway on top of a file cabinet started to ring. Now that's the hotline emergency phone to use when someone has a heart attack or something other than a fire (different procedures for a fire). It never rings--well maybe twice in almost three years. The guy whose office is across the hall went out and answered it, then hung up. Ten minutes later it rang again, and the person in the cube around the corner answered it then hung up. Next time it rings, I'm really tempted to answer it myself and say "This is Commissioner Gordon." Yes the phone is a really old-fashioned looking model and it really is red. It looks just like the batphone except that it has a numeric keypad instead of a rotary dial.

Moving on to bonehead...Fat Albert (named in memory of the tv show) or FA for short, was emailing from LA where he's a sales associate, saying he was having problems getting CampaignRF to run using the .flt file I sent him after he edited it. Okay, he didn't need to edit it, because I had already done the necessary editing for him, and I made that clear in my email, but he went ahead and dicked around with it, screwing it up in the process. Ed and I had to tell him to just use the one I sent as is, and reinstall it. That worked.

Then he emailed again saying he was getting an error message about Telecume not having filters for age 10+. I don't know what version of those two .flt files he was using, but I sent him mine since they worked for me. Okay those worked for him, too. Then he emailed to say he was having a problem with the filter file for CinemaCume when he tried to combine in cinema advertising audiences to Wal-Mart in-store tv (proprietary database for a client, set up like magazines), regular tv (TeleCume), and movie theaters (CinemaCume). He was even generous enough to take a screenshot and dump it into Powerpoint and attach it. Why he can't just drop it into the email body so I can read it inline without having to open a huge attachment is beyond me.

Well, wouldn't you know it? First off, there is no filter file associated with the CinemaCume app--it uses the one from the app from which it originally cloned--TeleCume. Second, the error message said nothing about a filter--it said that the TeleCume app couldn't find the age 2+ demographic it needed. I pointed this out and suggested he go into TeleCume and create it. That worked! He was astonished.

My thought cloud: FA, if you bothered to actually read the error message before you panicked and sent out an SOS about it, it told you exactly what it was looking for, and it didn't have the word filter in it at all. It said "demo," not "filter." That's your clue. It wasn't even a CampaignRF error message; it was a TeleCume one. He's friendly, he's nice, but he's a real bonehead.

The scariest thing is that he actually mans the client hotline in out LA office.

And you know, this just all circles right back into the batphone theme. Since the QA/Product Development person was working from home, I became FA's hotline "go-to" person today. It's not my job to do that, but I got stuck with it because I actually know what the fuck I'm doing, and happened to be available.