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I'm not sure I want to go down that rabbit warren...

Was giving his employer his own personal cell phone number.

If the company wants you to be available on a cell phone, they provide the number and the telephone. Not keeping work and personal matters separate is what causes this kind of problem.

Yup, I have two phones. The company number is known, and that phone is polluted with the Windows excuses for mobile applications (which ought to get awards for worst UIs ever seen on a mobile platform, but I digress). It diverts calls to my personal phone, but that's something that *I* control, not the company. And I don't call back from my personal phone, obviously.

When I'm on leave, the forward is off. Simple. Only my boss has my personal number, and he and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to personal time - I think he's one of the better ones I had the pleasure to work with. Some of the cretins I worked for had this idea they someone bought themselves slave labour - that usually didn't last long as I'm quite, umm, clear in my communication in that respect, and it's the joy of a specialist profession that they need you a lot more than the other way around..

Do I read that correctly? Windows-Phone? Those still exist? Or is that the MS apps for 'droid? Those are... well.... quite par for the software quality coming out of Redmond in the last decade or so.

The Windows Phone UI was a pleasure to use, responsive, unobtrusive, quite plain. Unfortunately they had to ruin it.

No, he means Microsoft mobile apps. Like Outlook for mobile which is slower than a dehydrated slug, has a massive floating "New E-mail" button that obscures part of the message you're trying to read, and which randomly decides not to show you new e-mails because Intune is "syncing your policy" in the background. Of course, it doesnt tell you this, it just doesnt bother showing you that urgent email that arrived in your inbox 15 minutes ago...

BYOD is a terrible idea from both ends, full stop. It's in the employer's interests to ensure a strict separation of work from personal, it makes things far easier to administer, monitor and secure. It means a responsible employer can be 100% confident that their employees have everything required to do their job, without running the risk of the employee making perfectly legitimate claims for expenses if they're expected to use personal funds for work purposes without it being explicitly stated in their employment contract.

And from the employee's perspective, it keeps your employer's IT department out of your device, which in the worst cases, could require a factory reset to get their tendrils out if they're uncooperative. Not to mention the benefits of being able to switch off and put away your work phone and laptop when outside of office hours or on leave.

I agree, though I have so far been willing to let them send normal voice calls, SMS messages, or OTP codes to my personal device. Anything more than that and they can buy a device to do it. Their IT department gets no administration rights over any personal device whatsoever. Fortunately, I have never had that particular contact method abused by managers.

Exactly this. I remember a former mangler acquiring my personal cellphone number from the seemingly unprotected HR database. I found this out when I was getting texts at around 23:00 on a Saturday asking if I could come in two hours early on Monday for "voluntary" overtime. I was in the pub, a few pints in. It took some self-control to not reply telling him to fuck off (and his number got blocked on my phone).

When he asked if I had read the text messages I told him I hadn't received any and that he must have sent them to an incorrect number. Leaving that job was a relief.

In the new job I had a manager asked me about work-life balance and was I happy with mine. I replied that my work phone is turned off as I leave the building every day, and turned back on when I arrive the next morning. If the building burns to the ground overnight I won't know until I arrive in the car park. Thankfully he's of the same view!

I think Warren did the right thing by giving out the bosses number, but this is why I refuse to give my personal number for work related matters or install work related apps on it.

As a former contractor I have two phones, one is my own number for people who know me to call and the other is a work number. That way I can leave the work phone at home when I go out for the day so that I don’t get bothered.

If someone wants me to be on call then they can supply and pay for a work phone which will get handed back when you leave the company.

Could have been worse....could have been the wrong country too !

I work on Linux boxes (both my desktop and various compute servers and HPC systems), my missus works on Windows, my work uses Gmail and the like, my missus Outlook and all that MS stuff. I write my papers in LaTeX, she only uses MS-Word, etc. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but somehow, because I work at the Computer Science department she tends to think I am a spare help desk for her work. I have repeatedly explained I know nothing of Outlook, and studiously want to keep it that way. After a long day at work, I don't feel like sorting driver issues on her work laptop, or configuring her work print tool, of which I have zero knowledge.

My in-laws are similarly under the impression that I am able to solve any issue with their computer. Happily, my sons now mainly take care of their issues, and I find my in-laws are more inclined to listen to their grandchildren than to me.

> My in-laws are similarly under the impression that I am able to solve any issue with their computer.

A few years ago I built myself a PC. As my parents had just bought a Windows PC with Windows 8.0 on it so I put that on instead of Windows 7 - I guess that's a form of child abuse...

At some point I need to tell them that the PC (now on Win10) needs to be replaced due to MS ending its support next year - this will no doubt mean I'll be "working" over Christmas :)

My wife actually walks into my Home Office asking for "IT Support"

""No, it is not," Warren replied, explaining that he had changed jobs but had the number of someone who could help.

At which point he read out his former manager's personal mobile number."

I hope his former mangler liked the calls.

He deserved them, obviously.

It is managerial duty to oversee that helpdesk contacts go where the appropriate resources are. This one failed to do his job.

I hope he liked getting woken up.

I'm also pretty sure that, after a day or two, he finally updated the helpdesk phone roster.

That said, I absolutely agree about personal/professional phone difference. My customers have my professional number, which is available from 8 to 19.

My personal number is none of their business.

>>which is available from 8 to 19.

Wow - you are generous!

My work number is off until the second my backside hits the desk chair at exactly (for given values of exactly) 0730, and then on until I lock the server room door at 1630 on the nail, 8 hours later. The boss has my personal number but she knows not to call me except in dire emergencies and only for things that will be a 30s conversation to fix or acknowledge that whatever appears to be broken is actually broken and will remain so until the next working day.

Oddly this is thanks to her boss who, in no uncertain terms, told me that I should be able to do my job within my contracted hours. Lucky him - he wants work to rule, he gets it. And lucky me, because work/life balance is much better!

0730, ... until ... 1630 ..., 8 hours later.

Hmmm.

Including an hour lunch break, perhaps?

The first rule of lunch club ...

> My work number is off until the second my backside hits the desk chair at exactly (for given values of exactly) 0730, and then on until I lock the server room door at 1630 on the nail, 8 hours later.

So your server room is in a different time zone than your desk chair?

Personally I'd have passed it over as soon as the manager decided it was hilarious to get calls in the middle of the night.

I managed a team who supported the systems the developers used. They also answered the phone from our end users.

There were always a couple of user's who did not read emails, phoned the help desk, didn't follow the advice given,and threatened to "phone your manager".

I got the details of a couple of these people and phoned them back.

I was very sweet on them. I listened to their problems, and asked if they had seen the emails. yes they had, they didn't have time to read them etc. They said every one had the same problem, so it wasn't just them.

I then said they were clearly overworked, and so I'd speak to their manager about them being worked so hard, that they could not read urgent and important information. Also, as their manager was the one asking for this very important upgrade, I had better check with their manager about which request had higher priority. If every one has the same sort of problem, I'd speak to their manager to see how widespread the problem was.

Cue the sound of furious back peddling. The people suddenly realised that their manager was going to hear about this and their manager would take action!

These people stopped complaining, and when they did phone the helpdesk they were as sweet as pie.

My wife's boss once told somebody who treated his employees badly that only he had the right to shout at them, after all, he does pay them. Customers are free to shout at him (they pay him), at which point he might rethink doing business with them.

Note that he does not shout (as this is not the correct way to treat people).

It wasn't unusual to use your own mobile in the past, company phones tended to be limited to people who were on the road a lot. If you were lucky you might get a pager or, in a large team, there might be an "on call" mobile so it was simple convenience. Most of the time people respected that and would only call or message in a genuine emergency, such as when the warehouse came on-shift at 22:00 on a Sunday only to find the Friday late shift had changed the user* password on the ERP system and not told them.

One manager didn't understand the term "respect" though. He once called me three times in succession at around 2am without leaving a message. I ignored him, it turned out the only issue was a spreadsheet that wouldn't update and I couldn't have done anything about it from home in the the early hours anyway. I made it very clear that any repetition would result in a formal complaint. That manager was one of the reasons I left the company but that's another story!

We had plenty of experiences of Americans not understanding geography, on one occasion the corporate HR in the US asked our UK HR Manager to "pop over to Australia and help them with a problem!" They seemed to assume that as Australia were "British" they must be geographically close and were quite surprised when it was pointed out that they were a lot closer than we were.

*Yes, we had a single user for the entire warehouse as it wasn't viable for them to log on and off constantly. We'd have had a user per shift but the compliance people from the US were trying to insist we must not have any generic users, creating more than a couple would have generated unwanted attention.

Security requirements …. Very necessary these days for both practical and business (being able to tender) reasons. But some security people dream up solutions to problems which are entirely impractical for actual users and once the security paperwork is signed off they don’t want to change it. You just have to wait for the next iteration and hope someone else gets the gig.

The same compliance people told one of the group companies that they must separate debtor and creditor roles in accounts, and whoever raised the POs could not also enter invoices. All a bit difficult when the company only has one administrator!

I knew my split personality disorder would come in handy eventually!!!

Hi, please meet Debbie Tor, and her teammate Christie Rachel Editor...

I was working for a company where I was the whole of the team in Europe but my grade meant I got nothing for working outside normal hours. They tried to push a mobile phone on me so I could be called out of hours and I declined which caused a little friction so I offered to use the BYOD scheme and use my personal phone to pick up alerts and read email etcs. Once I read the details I withdrew the offer as the first step was to make them the admins for my phone with full remote control...yeah, not happening.

I then completed the rest of my time with them providing full support for my normal hours (plus a little extra when I was requested and had nothing else lined up). Slept well every night

I had one a while ago, where someone emailed the UK helpdesk (me) instead of the the US one.

He was having issues with the network point.

I wrote a long email regarding the temperature of the office may be too low due to the AC being turned up too high which caused the copped to contact and restrict the network traffic.

I suggested that he should carefully warm the cable under his desk with his hands, or he could contact the US help desk.

I got a nice email back saying he loved the joke and would contact the US helpdesk

They never follow the instructions ;-)

I once had, as a work phone, a recycled number from some for of internal legal desk of the police. People calling me in the night blurting out specific details about police actions before I could react. It takes a few of those calls before you understand what is going on. Called the police, changed number.

We're cautious about reissuing mobile numbers internally after one person had given their work number to a finance company. He was clearly in arrears with them but they refused to accept that it was a work phone and he was no longer with us, even after me contacting them directly. As the calls came from different random numbers they couldn't be blocked.

We ended up changing the number, and now generally do so routinely unless it's a sales manager's number passed on to their replacement,

Many years ago and in another country, a security company ended up one digit away from our home phone. That meant calls from their customers when alarms went off in the small hours.

The only thing we found that would fix things was answering the phone, assuring them that someone was on the way, and going back to bed.

I don't know if they changed their number or went out of business, but the calls stopped.

"You want me to be on-call for the 128 hours a week that I'm not already contracted to work? Yes that's fine; my rate for that is £100/hour. Payable a month in advance."

(and I reserve the right to outsource this role)

I have a personal cell and a work issued iPhone. Nobody outside of management has my personal cell number, and when I clock out for the day I turn off the company iPhone. Fortunately, I'm not salaried, so anything that happens outside my scheduled hours is not normally my concern as I'm not on call.

I also mute my personal phone and leave it in my home office to charge at night.

I work for a US corp. There are five timezones in the continental US so in theory they should know how timezones work outside the US, yet somehow they don't. They just dump work on me at my end of day and expect it done by their end of day.

Also some of them reply to emails during their night. I'm not going to wait till their start of day to send a bunch of emails. They seem to think that turning off the fucking phone or at the very least turning on do not disturb is not an option.

Also in my efforts to try and maintain a semblance of a work-life balance while working for a US company I have a work number and the SIM is disabled unless I'm on call. Outlook and Teams aren't installed, if it's important they'll call me, but that'll only work if I'm on call.

Many of my colleagues are on Central European Time and so I am forced to take my lunch at 11:00 or have it interrupted, or meeting assigned in it.

I have tried marking my lunch time as 'in a meeting' every day, but upper management said I must not, and it did not stop all those people who ignored it anyway.

Either get another phone, or start using Dual-SIM.

I have no idea why anyone would think I wouldn't just block their number on my personal phone / number.