What is this caled? (Opposite of ACD?) [Telecom]

The difference between "who" and "whom" is the same as the difference between "he" and "him".

"He is placing the call" --> "the user who is placing the call"

"You called him" --> "the user whom you called"

Now you know. And no grammatical theory or terminology is required!

I'm a linguist; they pay me to think about things like this.

***** Moderator's Note *****

MC, they should pay you extra for today: yours is the most clear, concise, and memorable advice I've ever received on this subject.

Of course, I can't promise I'll always remember to apply it, but I _will_ always remember that you explained it well. ;-)

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Glad to be of service. Here's one more:

The difference between "its" and "it's" is the same as the difference between "his" and "he's".

"He's puzzling." -> "It's puzzling."

"his strange attributes" -> "its strange attributes"

(Unlike nouns, possessive pronouns, such as "his," don't have an apostrophe.)

If everybody would teach grammar this way, we'd have a much easier time. Instead, it is traditional to teach English grammar by force-fitting it onto Latin grammar -- which doesn't work very well; Latin has a very different structure than English, and if you insist on describing English with Latin rules and tools of thought, you get a lot of things wrong, such as the mysterious rule against split infinitives.

Now back to telecom...

***** Moderator's Note *****

OMG! Latin? I didn't know that!

As the parent of a learning-disabled child, I've had to see way too much of the dark underbelly of American education, and this explains a lot - I don't remember any Latin, but the idea of basing instruction in one language on the grammar of another is typical of the kind of snafus I've seen.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Oops. In your example above, 'his strange attributes', "his" is of course a possessive _adjective_, not a possessive pronoun.

'the red BMW is _his_ car' -> adjective, _describing_ 'car'

'the blue Audi is _his_' -> pronoun, _replacing_ '(Bill's) car'

This can be confusing because in the third person singular (masculine) the same form, "his", is used in both instances. With the feminine at least there is the difference between 'her' (adjective) and 'hers' (pronoun) and with first person singular the distinction is perfectly clear:

'my' -> 'mine'.

Let's not even get started with its / it's :-) -- what a can of worms that is! Just the other day I actually saw someone use its' (can you imagine?!?).

Oh, and by the way ... going back to

we get your point. But consider this conversation heard daily down the pub:

Mike: 'Oh, hallo lads! What'll ye have?'

Bill: 'I'll have a Guinness, please'.

Henry: 'Thanks, mate! Mine's a lager'.

'Mine' is most definitely a possessive pronoun and that is indubitably an apostrophe crept in, there. So, appearances can be deceiving!

cheers,

Henry

There are a number of PBX systems out there that did that when I was working for MCI. We installed WATS lines of varying bands 1 through 5. It was the PBX that had to select which one to use. For example, if you placed a call over a band 1 (and the number was reachable on band 1), the cost was less to process the call than if they sent it over a WATs line with a higher band.

Without being familar with your hardware and your method of doing business, it would be difficult for anyone on here to tell you how to solve it. Perhaps you should tell a litte more about the specifics of your system and what you are doing. Then perhaps someone on here could make a suggestion.

Fred

No, I want a different line to be selected based on the user who logs into the station.

e.g. UserA logs into Station 1, the voice jack on the wall is routed to 999-999-0001 UserB logs into Station 1, the voice jack on the wall is routed to 999-999-0002

Right now what I have is my voice jacks wired to a rack mounted set of rj 45 ports, and the lines coming in to another rack mounted set of rj

45 ports, and i make the connection between the voice jack and outgoing phone line with a cat 5 patch cable.

What I'm looking for is hardware that would allow me to manage this over a LAN. Sending commands to tell it to route the voice jack for station1 to 999-999-0001, or switch it to 999-999-0002.

If i knew the terminology for any of these things I probably wouldn't need to ask the questions.

***** Moderator's Note *****

So, you want to measure the productivity of individual employees by inspecting the call records for "their" telephone line, and you want "their" line to follow them no matter what seat they sit in on a particular day.

This is a classic case for Computer-Telephone-Integration (CTI) technology. Systems already exist that will either marry an individual computer login to a specific employee identifier in the outgoing phone logs, or require employees to "log in" to their telephone system when they sit down. You don't need to invent anything new: I invite the various vendors who read this list to post a (short!) summary of their systems' capabilities.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Don't blame the Americans. It is the mainstream of the way grammar has been taught in Europe and its colonies since the 1500s -- since national languages began to replace Latin for serious written communication. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was widely felt that Latin was a "real" language and the regional languages of Europe (English, French, etc.) were not.

But English grammar can be done well; it's just that a lot of the teaching is done by people who don't understand it deeply enough. See:

This is why all schoolteachers should take linguistics courses.

Right. It is syntactically an adjective but is formed from a pronoun and serves as the possessive of a pronoun.

...

But "'s" stands for "is" there. It is not a possessive marker.

Surely there is a linguistics newsgroup somewhere...

***** Moderator's Note *****

I'm sure there are several linguistics groups, but it's too much fun watching who trumps whom.

Better watch out: I'll cc: my sister, and she can split an infinitive until the participle grins ...

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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I don't think it's entirely fair for me to compete. I'm a professional (Ph.D. in linguistics, specializing in grammatical theory, doing natural language processing and computational psycholinguistics for a living;

Life is too short to spend much time arguing about things that are just differences of terminology, or facts that are perfectly clear to the experts but are often mis-taught in high schools. So I'll bow out now. Remember, there are linguists in every college, and linguistics books in every good library.

That's unfortunate, because you have a knack for explaining the rules... and far too many posts are littered with errors far beyond what might be explained by haste or poor typing skills. Not that it's really telecom-related, but I've also noticed a dramatic increase in grammatical errors in print media recently, probably due to the downsizing of editing departments rather than declining skill among editors, but sad because people aren't going to learn how to read and write correctly if everything they read is full of errors.

Er... I don't mean I'm leaving the group. I just don't want to conduct a long drawn-out off-topic conversation here. I'll definitely respond to direct questions!

Thanks for your kind words.

No, actually, the employees are telemarketers working on differnet campaigns. The different campaigns are seperate and have different phone lines and caller id displays. Some employees work on more than one campaign. But when they do, they have to sit at different stations to call for the different campaigns.

Id like them to sit one desk and have the outgoing phone number associated with the voice jack at that station switch depending on which campaign they are logged into.

You're going to have to trust me on this, this is what I want it to do. (which is what i've been saying from the beginning).

***** Moderator's Note *****

I already trust you; I'm trying to cut your problem down to manageable size.

There are several systems that will allow your employees to either log on as a different user, or charge to another a different call-charge account, either per login or per-call. The system then chooses the outgoing line based on the account and/or user, so you get the appropriate caller-id info sent.

There are also systems available which will send appropriate caller-id info no matter which outgoing trunk a call winds up on: this is also a common function in upper-end call management systems. Of course, it requires PRI ISDN service and lot of electronics at your site.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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