Telephone trouble

Okay, sometimes some people in my office can be, well, pretty stupid. Just sometimes.

Today T. was asking me how to do conference calling. (For some reason, the secretarial staff doesn't know how to do some of the more basic secretarial functions -- like create a conference call -- and I do. Go fig.) So I told her the process, which involves: (1) placing Call #1; (2) hitting the "Conf." button; (3) placing Call #2 on a different line; and (4) pressing the "Conf." button again. Not terribly difficult, right?

T. decides she wants to try out the function before actually using it. (I don't know why she felt the need to do this. It's not like we're doing a conference call out of this office this afternoon.) Instead of executing the test run on, say, some cell phones or something, though, she decides to conference two phone lines from the office together. That is, she picked up line 3, called line 2, then patched the two lines together. Effectively, she has created an endless loop of nobody connected to nobody. No phone in the office now is permitted to break into the "conversation" because the lines are "in use," and we can't seem to figure out how to cancel the ill-conceived "conference call."

Sometimes it's amazing any work actually gets done around here.