One of the most entertaining bugs I’ve ever witnessed is in the Caller ID system at the Austin Stone. I helped Doug roll out a voice over IP system when the church ran out of extensions on it’s legacy system. One of the neat things we did is write a perl script that would take each inbound call and do a database lookup that searched for any members who had that phone number.
The system worked great, and like all good systems was forgotten and people just learned to trust that we just had really accurate caller id. This was a problem for some people because they were in the habit of calling into the office to do occasional prank calls. The most famous of these was on a new ministry assistant’s first day, when one of the members of the church called in pretending to be Louie Giglio and asked for Chris Tomlin’s cell phone number. (For those not steeped in Christian culture, Chris Tomlin used to be the worship leader at the Stone and he is fairly famous, Louie Giglio is also fairly famous and is close with Tomlin). This flustered the new worker, and Matt Carter got on the line to see why Louie needed Tomlin’s number, at which point the ruse unraveled.
The system was called into question one day when the office manager received a phone call from one ‘Christ, Jesus’, which for some reason they immediately thought was me playing a prank. I was offended, not because that kind of goofing around was beneath me, but rather because I wish I had thought of it.
As it turns out, several months after rolling out caller ID, we introduced a new web application for people to sign up for small groups, and one of the steps was for people to enter their contact information into the system. One young adult small group leader thought it would be hilarious to have Jesus in his group, so he signed him up; Jesus Christ, address: 2000 Salvation Drive, Jerusalem, TX 12345, phone: (000) 000-0000. That last part caused the issue, as there are some auto-dialers that send 000-000-0000 as their caller id, and our spiffy caller id system overrides the default message and tells the office that Our Lord and Savior is calling.