["Christmas Song" by Alvin and the Chipmunks]
If you've been following this blog since the very beginning, you may recall the Frantic for Fran blog regarding voice mail in Germany. I ended the blog essentially pining away for one of the Cisco IP phones that I know and love. Well, I now have a Cisco IP phone in Moscow and I still have telecom issues (through no fault of Cisco, I believe).
Let me preface this posting with a cultural note. In the US, we like our voice mail. It's convenient for when we're on another line, away from the phone or (let's be honest here) don't want to talk to whoever's calling or think that the "Unknown" number is a telemarketer. This leads to very good corporate voicemail systems that, for example:
This is the kind of goodness I'm used to. We only had maybe one or two of those features in Germany. And German voice mail is a rock star compared to Russia.
But the other part of the cultural note is the reality in Russia, which seems to be that you always pick up your phone when someone calls. It doesn't matter if you're in a meeting, if you're on a different line or (as I have seen in action) are in the bathroom. No need for voice mail. Uhhh..... To me this was shocking. I've always been taught that if you take a call when you're with or talking to someone else, it signals that the person calling is more important than the one you're talking to (which is to say, it's rude). You avoid being rude by saying in advance, "I'm expecting an important call from my [client, boss, wife, etc.) and will need to take that" or noting when that person calls that it's X and would you mind if you take the call quickly? And it is for this very reason that the "Send all calls" button exists - so you can block out interruptions when you're on an important call or in a meeting.
Not so in Russia where there is neither a Send all Calls button or an ability to divert a call to your assistant. In fact, it turns out that even when I was on a call, the inbound call would not go to voicemail. Instead, it would be routed to my assistant. If she didn't pick up, it went to the other administrative assistant. If she didn't pick it up, it went back to assistant, and on and on until either someone picked up or the caller hung up. It never came back to me nor did it go to voice mail. When I discovered this, I asked to please have all of my calls go to voice mail if I wasn't available. I was met with a kind of stunned silence. My assistant said she'd look into it. It turns out this required direct intervention from IT to reprogram this for me. Seriously? But I now have voice mail, though when it plays the messages, it seems to do so in double-time, so it's kind of like listening to a chipmunk talking. Not so good.
So that pretty much covers the situation for incoming calls. Outgoing calls is an entirely different matter. If the number you're calling is a local Moscow landline with a 495 prefix, it's easy - just dial a 0 and enter the numbers after the 495 and you'll be connected. It gets a bit complicated if it's a mobile phone, a "toll free" number or, heaven forbid, a number in a different country.
In those instances, you have to go to a menu on the Cisco phone. First, you have to indicate whether it is a long distance call or whether it is an internal call to one of our selected offices globally that have VOIP (Voice over IP) calling. The latter option is actually pretty cool. You scroll down the list of countries (Germany is #1 - just sayin', though USA is at the very bottom at #23 but which is a jersey number of a certain former Chicago Bulls player, so I'm okay with that) and select the country of interest. In most cases, you then just type in the last five digits of the phone number and you're put right through and it comes up locally with at least your last name rather than a long, off-putting (and perhaps intriguing) string of numbers beginning with 007 (+7 being the country code for Russia). If you select the US, though, you then get to scroll through all the cities where we have offices. Apparently, I am the only person who sees the beauty of this as apparently no one had raised the issue that the alphabetic listing of cities ended somewhere after Boston, thus neglecting such key cities as Chicago and, yeah, New York. All pretty magical - and has to be much less expensive than dialing directly. More on cost-of-calling in a moment.
If you're not calling an internal number, though, you must choose from a separate menu of three choices: Chargeable, non-chargeable and private. Now, at any given point in time, there are probably 10-12 projects open in my name that I may be working on. I don't know all of the eight-digit engagement codes by heart, so I usually just choose non-chargeable (and also because, as many of you may know, I really don't like to talk on the phone, but prefer a quick e-mail). And with very rare exceptions, I don't make personal phone calls from the office, particularly with the time difference to the US and lack of time to make any friends locally. Even so, though, it is a hassle to just make a phone call.
The import of all of this came to haunt me sometime in April, though, when I got my first electronic phone bill through the firm. For my land line, it lists every single call I've made and asks me to provide the related internal or client charge code. Line by line. Failure to do so results in everything being classified as "Private" and being deducted from my paltry salary. Good incentive to "encourage" review, I have to admit. But honestly, I have no idea who I called and many do not match up with appointments on my calendar. Hmmm.... Difficult. And very time-consuming. It reinforced the beauty of using the VOIP options to other options, though, as they're "free" or at least not listed on the chart of my calls.
The same is required of my BlackBerry. This gets more difficult because you also have to indicate the right code for incoming calls and who knows who has called me from which numbers? And then there's a blanket charge for the data service and you can't really allocate that to anything in particular. I know I'm not surfing the internet with the horrible BlackBerry browser, so it's a bunch of emails that could relate to anything on any given day. But about a month ago, I learned how ridiculously expensive roaming is on my current plan. In one month I had been in Stockholm, Budapest, Amsterdam, London and the US and my resulting phone bill was about RUB 100,000 or about $3,000. Yikes! I think that is more than I had even when I was in China for an entire month! Half of that was data, but the other part was a bit ambiguous as usual. I entered the calls that I thought made sense and submitted for reimbursement. But it wasn't approved. Not denied, just not approved. And they took all of it out of my paltry payroll here (recall, I only get per diems here). Ouch! Still working on that. Not at all pleased....
And don't even get me started about not having an instance conference call number to use. The best we have is to set something up with only a Russian dial-in. Not a big crowd-please for international calls....
Let me preface this posting with a cultural note. In the US, we like our voice mail. It's convenient for when we're on another line, away from the phone or (let's be honest here) don't want to talk to whoever's calling or think that the "Unknown" number is a telemarketer. This leads to very good corporate voicemail systems that, for example:
- Allow you to send a voicemail to a colleague without having to call them directly (for example, if they're busy and you don't want to interrupt them or it's just easier to leave a voice mail than to type something out in an email that might be misinterpreted or, worse yet, forwarded)
- Forward messages received to other colleagues (which admittedly subverts one of the pluses of voicemail above, though there is the "private" option that prevents forwarding)
- Send messages to a group of people at one time (e.g. "Hey, everyone in my team, here's something you should know [and I know you don't read all your emails]")
- Respond back to a voice mail without having to call the person (this saves a lot of time and money, particularly when you're traveling or don't have a piece of paper to write down the person's number etc.)
- Send an e-mail to you when you have voice mail so you know when to dial in
- Allow you to call in from "local" dial-in numbers in multiple countries
This is the kind of goodness I'm used to. We only had maybe one or two of those features in Germany. And German voice mail is a rock star compared to Russia.
But the other part of the cultural note is the reality in Russia, which seems to be that you always pick up your phone when someone calls. It doesn't matter if you're in a meeting, if you're on a different line or (as I have seen in action) are in the bathroom. No need for voice mail. Uhhh..... To me this was shocking. I've always been taught that if you take a call when you're with or talking to someone else, it signals that the person calling is more important than the one you're talking to (which is to say, it's rude). You avoid being rude by saying in advance, "I'm expecting an important call from my [client, boss, wife, etc.) and will need to take that" or noting when that person calls that it's X and would you mind if you take the call quickly? And it is for this very reason that the "Send all calls" button exists - so you can block out interruptions when you're on an important call or in a meeting.
Not so in Russia where there is neither a Send all Calls button or an ability to divert a call to your assistant. In fact, it turns out that even when I was on a call, the inbound call would not go to voicemail. Instead, it would be routed to my assistant. If she didn't pick up, it went to the other administrative assistant. If she didn't pick it up, it went back to assistant, and on and on until either someone picked up or the caller hung up. It never came back to me nor did it go to voice mail. When I discovered this, I asked to please have all of my calls go to voice mail if I wasn't available. I was met with a kind of stunned silence. My assistant said she'd look into it. It turns out this required direct intervention from IT to reprogram this for me. Seriously? But I now have voice mail, though when it plays the messages, it seems to do so in double-time, so it's kind of like listening to a chipmunk talking. Not so good.
So that pretty much covers the situation for incoming calls. Outgoing calls is an entirely different matter. If the number you're calling is a local Moscow landline with a 495 prefix, it's easy - just dial a 0 and enter the numbers after the 495 and you'll be connected. It gets a bit complicated if it's a mobile phone, a "toll free" number or, heaven forbid, a number in a different country.
In those instances, you have to go to a menu on the Cisco phone. First, you have to indicate whether it is a long distance call or whether it is an internal call to one of our selected offices globally that have VOIP (Voice over IP) calling. The latter option is actually pretty cool. You scroll down the list of countries (Germany is #1 - just sayin', though USA is at the very bottom at #23 but which is a jersey number of a certain former Chicago Bulls player, so I'm okay with that) and select the country of interest. In most cases, you then just type in the last five digits of the phone number and you're put right through and it comes up locally with at least your last name rather than a long, off-putting (and perhaps intriguing) string of numbers beginning with 007 (+7 being the country code for Russia). If you select the US, though, you then get to scroll through all the cities where we have offices. Apparently, I am the only person who sees the beauty of this as apparently no one had raised the issue that the alphabetic listing of cities ended somewhere after Boston, thus neglecting such key cities as Chicago and, yeah, New York. All pretty magical - and has to be much less expensive than dialing directly. More on cost-of-calling in a moment.
If you're not calling an internal number, though, you must choose from a separate menu of three choices: Chargeable, non-chargeable and private. Now, at any given point in time, there are probably 10-12 projects open in my name that I may be working on. I don't know all of the eight-digit engagement codes by heart, so I usually just choose non-chargeable (and also because, as many of you may know, I really don't like to talk on the phone, but prefer a quick e-mail). And with very rare exceptions, I don't make personal phone calls from the office, particularly with the time difference to the US and lack of time to make any friends locally. Even so, though, it is a hassle to just make a phone call.
The import of all of this came to haunt me sometime in April, though, when I got my first electronic phone bill through the firm. For my land line, it lists every single call I've made and asks me to provide the related internal or client charge code. Line by line. Failure to do so results in everything being classified as "Private" and being deducted from my paltry salary. Good incentive to "encourage" review, I have to admit. But honestly, I have no idea who I called and many do not match up with appointments on my calendar. Hmmm.... Difficult. And very time-consuming. It reinforced the beauty of using the VOIP options to other options, though, as they're "free" or at least not listed on the chart of my calls.
The same is required of my BlackBerry. This gets more difficult because you also have to indicate the right code for incoming calls and who knows who has called me from which numbers? And then there's a blanket charge for the data service and you can't really allocate that to anything in particular. I know I'm not surfing the internet with the horrible BlackBerry browser, so it's a bunch of emails that could relate to anything on any given day. But about a month ago, I learned how ridiculously expensive roaming is on my current plan. In one month I had been in Stockholm, Budapest, Amsterdam, London and the US and my resulting phone bill was about RUB 100,000 or about $3,000. Yikes! I think that is more than I had even when I was in China for an entire month! Half of that was data, but the other part was a bit ambiguous as usual. I entered the calls that I thought made sense and submitted for reimbursement. But it wasn't approved. Not denied, just not approved. And they took all of it out of my paltry payroll here (recall, I only get per diems here). Ouch! Still working on that. Not at all pleased....
And don't even get me started about not having an instance conference call number to use. The best we have is to set something up with only a Russian dial-in. Not a big crowd-please for international calls....
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