Two Telephone Tips - one handy; one scary

The handy one: if you come across one of the dreaded telephone answering services that offer multiple choices and all you want to do is speak to a receptionist, try pressing the zero key straight away. It doesn't work on multiple level choices systems, but you do feel a slight victory when a real person is forced to answer the phone.

The scary one: if you have a system installed that allows an external caller to dial in and then use the switchboard to dial out again, check that the code settings have been changed from the suppliers default. You would be surprised how many are not - even to the extent that many businesses do not know that they have this facility.

The scary bit is that this is one of the ways that criminals raise cash by selling the information to other people. In one case that I know of, a business was targeted over a weekend and had literally thousands of pounds worth of calls registered, mostly to sex chat lines in the Far East. The telephone installers won their argument that they had advised a secretary to change the setting and the company were held to be liable for the cost of calls.