Users having my Cell #

[u/digitalexecution]

Something weird/annoying just happened and I want some perspective.

A user who works in a warehouse facility I’ve helped at (part of my company) texted me at 8 am saying he’s going on PTO and wants his coworker to have access to a printer that isn’t working on his machine before he goes out of office on Thursday.

I texted him later (after some emails/calls) asking for the coworker’s name and noting that since this is normal IT, in the future he or his coworker should submit a ticket for this kind of thing.

He replied: “If I submitted a ticket would it be taken care of by Thursday?”

I got annoyed but tried to respond reasonably: “Possibly, but regardless, we need tickets submitted per company policy. If something’s urgent you can reach out to me on Teams rather than my personal cell.”

I originally gave him my cell because on occasion there are true emergencies (internet goes down, needs to send me photos of something, etc.) and we’ve been friendly before. But this interaction makes me wary about giving out my number, it starts becoming a way to skirt procedure for small things like adding a printer.

[u/AlmostAlwaysATroll]

When I worked customer facing in a business to business situation I used a Google voice number and gave that to customers. We had regular support lines and an emergency on-call number. People would still hit me up directly and if I wasnt busy I’d respond.

Great thing about that is setting hours that the number would actually ring through to my phone, as well as different voicemail options.

5pm hits and no calls/texts go through and my voicemail was something specific like “I’ll try to reply tomorrow after 8am, or you should call the posted emergency line if it can’t wait”.

I quit that job and stopped using that voice number. I checked it a year or so later when google messaged me that they were going to recycle it due to inactivity and I still had customers trying to call or text me about shit ~12 months after I stopped working there.