The Phantom Telemarketer: How a Fired Employee Haunted Our Office Phones
Ever had a workday ruined by a mysterious glitch? Now, imagine this glitch shows up every few months, nukes your company phone lines, and vanishes without a trace—leaving a trail of confused managers and exasperated IT pros. Welcome to the tale of the “Ghost in the Phones,” where tech support meets a level of mischief that’s almost artistic.
It all started at a company that sells phone systems (yes, the irony is rich), where the office’s own phones ran on a “crappy little server.” When calls suddenly stopped coming in, no one suspected they were about to become the stars of an IT whodunit worthy of Sherlock Holmes—if Holmes was more into packet sniffers than pipes.
The Mystery of the Vanishing Phone Lines
The first sign of trouble was subtle but effective: calls just couldn’t get through. As the original poster (u/[deleted]) explained, this wasn’t exactly shocking—everyone in the company fiddled with the phones for testing, and the system’s logs were notoriously short-lived. A quick search revealed the culprit: the “Independence Day” holiday was enabled, blocking calls as if it were July 4th, even though it wasn’t.
No big deal, right? Someone must’ve just toggled the holiday override by mistake. Flip the switch back, and everything returns to normal. Except, as OP noted, “fixing it means we have no idea who did it originally because the metadata got overwritten in the database.” With logs set to self-destruct faster than a Mission: Impossible tape, the trail went cold in record time.
But then it happened again. And again. Each time, the support manager’s frustration grew—think less “mildly annoyed” and more “ready to perform a Mortal Kombat finishing move,” as OP put it. The boss wanted answers. He wanted new systems. He wanted longer logs. But as one commenter, u/Jonathan_the_Nerd, dryly put it: “I’m guessing no. Because ‘reasons’.”
Ghosts, Goblins, and… Telemarketers?
Months went by in this haunted limbo, with no clues, no culprits, and only the gnawing fear that one day, a high-value client would notice. It was, as u/Honest_Relation4095 observed, “somehow worrying” that a company selling phone systems was getting owned by their own.
Then, finally, a break: a client reported being unable to call in. This time, logs were captured before they vanished. The investigation revealed that the “holiday” was enabled not by an internal user, but by a call from an extension—one that was, bizarrely, tied to an external phone number.
And not just any number. This extension was triggered by a random telemarketer. “We got a call to the number very recently!” OP exclaimed. When they called back, it led to a telemarketer, not a saboteur. But the breadcrumbs in the configuration pointed back to someone on the support team… someone who had been fired months before.
The Art of the Perfect Exit Prank
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer diabolical elegance of this scheme. As u/Tieraslin put it: “Holy shit. I'm damned impressed by whoever did this.” The ex-employee had wired the system so that every time a certain extension was dialed—by anyone, even an outside caller—it would toggle the “Independence Day” holiday. But here’s the twist: it was a toggle, not a switch. So, as OP clarified in the comments, “not even every call would bork the support line. More accurately every other one would bork us.” Sometimes it would open the support line after hours, sometimes it would close it during business. Pure chaos.
Imagine the scene: a bored telemarketer auto-dials a number, and somewhere in an office, tech support plunges into crisis mode. As u/lokis_construction wryly noted, “The boss fired the person who knew what they were doing and knew it could not be tracked back to them. Bet they laugh every time they think about it.” It’s a real-life BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) moment, earning the admiration of commenters like u/ThunderDwn: “Truly BOFH worthy!”
And the pièce de résistance? As u/trro16p speculated, maybe the ex-employee even set up a Google Voice number to spoof calls and nuke the support line at will. “If they were smart enough to set that up my conclusion would be, hey I'm bored let's nuke those ass holes I used to work for server click click boom,” u/Spdsk84miles added gleefully.
Lessons (Not) Learned
So, what did the company do in response to this “malicious work of art,” as u/Pure-Meat9498 called it? Not much, apparently. Upper management did the corporate two-step of nodding sagely and then forgetting the problem existed. Security, as OP noted in a follow-up, was “actually pretty good”—as long as you trusted everyone not to go full Bond villain with their access.
The lurking lesson here isn’t just about tech. As u/Honest_Relation4095 pointed out, “Having a shitty phone system as a company that sells phone system should somehow worry the higher ups more.” But in this case, it took a truly creative exit—one that left even the victims “kind of impressed”—to wake the team up to their own vulnerabilities.
Conclusion: When Tech Support Gets Haunted, Laugh (and Learn)
The Ghost in the Phones saga is a cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever dismissed a weird glitch as “just a fluke.” If you give smart people enough access and not enough oversight, you might just end up haunted by your own infrastructure. As OP summed it up, “One way or another, respect; this was an epic way to go out.”
Have you ever been bested by an office phantom, or witnessed a parting prank for the ages? Share your stories in the comments—because in the world of tech support, the only thing scarier than ghosts in the machine… is not learning from them.
Original Reddit Post: Ghost In The Phones