Exploring the Internet
I was sitting in Tony's office reading a book while he went off to clear political barriers. In the other room, Julie Butterfield, his assistant, was busy typing away when the phone rang. Julie raced in with a pad of paper and answered the phone.
"Mr. Rutkowski's office." She scribbled some notes on a pad.
"I'll give him the message," Julie said, hanging up the phone. Something wasn't right with this picture. As she walked out, I inquired why she didn't just have the phone roll over to her desk if Tony doesn't pick it up.
"We have nothing that sophisticated here at the ITU," she responded with a smile and a strong dose of sarcasm.
A few minutes later, Tony came back and we started talking while Julie ran some errands. Her phone rang and Tony sprinted out to the outer office to take the call.
The ITU was using a very old donated Siemens PBX. This PBX was actually quite advanced for its time, but its time had long passed. This was a feature-rich PBX, but most of the features were so difficult to use that people didn't use them. Tony brought in his AT&T phone from home just so he could have a few stored numbers.
Until recently, in fact, the entire ITU had one fax machine for over 900 employees. A single fax machine was more the result of bureaucratic desire to limit outside communications than a cost factor. The fax machine was in the Secretary-General's office. This meant that sending a fax could require approval right up to the Secretary-General. To get the Secretary-General's approval, you had to go through the Deputy Secretary-General, which would require recursive approval right on down the food chain. Needless to say, to communicate through this medium you would have to be pretty strongly motivated.
What is really funny about all this is that ITU, as part of its enabling treaty, has the right to free telecommunications throughout the world. This perk is meant to allow easy communication to the 160 member countries, and even goes so far as to allow the ITU to set up terminal clusters at off-site meetings with X.25-based links back to Geneva.
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