Google Phone... oops

On a lighter note, before I left the office, I forwarded my desk phone so that I could appear to be working while not in the office. I forwarded it to my google phone number.... and tested a call. It worked quite well.

Google phone is pretty cool. It has a number of features that let you control what phone numbers will be called when someone calls the google phone number, even letting you set up a schedule as to when what phone numbers will be called. There are even google phone groups so you can direct calls from specific phone numbers to specific phones... kind of your own mini-switchboard. If a google phone were the home number, calls from the boss could be sent to voice mail, while calls from the daughter's boyfriend could be sent to her cell phone, etc., etc., etc.

When you set up a new phone number as the destination for a google phone, there's a validation process that you have to go through. It prevents you from redirecting calls to a wrong number. You click on "validate", it calls the destination number, you type in the validation code and voila... that phone can now be a target for your google phone.

Before I left town, I set up some defaults for my google phone: send calls to the house between 5 pm and 8 am, send calls to my desk from 9 am to 5 pm, send calls to my cell phone anytime. I even validated my cell phone and my home phone. Note: the office phone hadn't been validated, so no google phone calls were being redirected to the office phone (which is just as well - I'm not in town).

Then over the weekend, I had one of my less lucid moments. (I've been out of town long enough that I've had to do laundry). I thought: I can validate my desk phone. Since it's redirected to my google phone, it will ring my cell phone. It did and I did.

I got a call on my cell phone from the office today. Seems my office phone number was being reported as "out of service". If you haven't figured out yet, I nominate myself for the genius of the year award: my google phone was forwarding calls to my desk phone, which was forwarding then to my google phone which was ...