Many years ago I was a manager for a well know high street opticians
it was a busy Saturday and I got called over to the main desk as a colleague was having trouble getting the PDQ (card machine) to work. Nothing seemed to go through. Every time we were having to call card services and get the whole thing put through manually.
I called the PDQ people to see if there was an outage of some sort and they said that they weren't having any issues there, but they had received a number of calls from other stores in the same chain.

A call to another branch proved that they were having the same problem.

Word soon got round that most branches were having problems with their PDQ machines. Me, being the technically minded person I can be sometimes, decided that it might be worth trying the machine on a different phone line. So I unplugged the store phone, plugged the PDQ in and lo and behold it worked. I called another branch and got them to do the same thing. Yes, theirs worked too.

Come Monday morning, when head office came back to work after we had been struggling all over the weekend, we got an email.
It seemed that some bright spark had been looking at ways to make savings in stores. They noticed that nearly every store had a phone line in it that was showing no activity. So they called BT and had them all cut.
You see, calling the bank via a PDQ machine is on an 0800 number and therefore doesn't show up on the bill. Yes, this person had had the phone lines for every PDQ machine in the company cut.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Tue 28 Feb 2012, 22:54, 1 reply)

This is a very
satisfying post.
(username failed moderation, Wed 29 Feb 2012, 8:55, closed)