This is so dum

First off, I'm sure some of you have figured out that the word "business" at some point in history meant "the act of being busy." I still think that's cool. Dunno why.

I had a day full of business today. The weirdest thing happened in the office (sorry for those of you who read my away message to this effect).

Trina (AKA "Trey") is our new secretary (def: "One who secretes"). Trina handles that office like a well-handled office. She answers the phone promptly, courteously, with a low voice and an unidentifiable accent.

You must know the following for this story to make sense. Most university phone numbers have the prefix "542." In order to dial within the university, one must dial (or "mash" as my first high school band director would say) the number "2" followed by the four digit suffix. In order to dial the band room, one inside the university would dial "2-1505."

Trina fielded several phone calls from a fax machine. We determined by the ring that the call was from within the university. After several frustrating attempts to answer these calls, Trina decided to forward one of these incoming calls to our fax machine. When she did, we received the fax that the person in front of the fax machine intended to send.

Once received, Trina realized that the transmission was indeed not intended for us, but rather another office within the university. As she began to call the sender to give them the unfortunate news, she visually scanned the fax trying to determine how this person might have gotten the band office confused with the other office in question.

I heard her begin to giggle in a fashion that was most certainly expressive of embarassment for the sender as she explained the error to the person on the other end of the line.

"Ma'am," she said, "someone in your office has been trying to fax a document to our phone number, but that isn't the fax number on the cover sheet. Apparently, that person was accidentally dialing..."


"... the date."

Our phone: 2-1505
Today's date: 2-15-05

Moral of the story: It's better to do nothing at all than to do something stupid.

In just two minutes, this possibility will not occur for another one hundred years. I'm sure by then, everyone will have figured out that it's much easier to just walk things from one place to another.