NOTE: "Ma Bell" works when electricity is out, BUT with some other phone companies and their systems, THEY rely on electricity. If you have more than one phone line (one should be a dedicated line for credit card transaction/approvals etc., despite if it is with a credit card machine you use or part of your computer system) make sure you get a "roll over" (if one line is busy it will roll over to the other line EXCEPT for the credit card line, which you want to keep seperate.
Been there done that: New fangled phone company with new fangled phones that only work on electricity. Big storm, and the electric is out. Computer system doesn't work for orders (thank God I had some spare Guest Checks) the phone doesn't work, AND I cannot use the credit card machine for authorization OR print out. I couldn't use the phone to call the credit card authorization center!! So I used credit card slips to manually write in the information. Finally, after a case of candles (even the cooks were cooking by candle light! Thank God I saved alot of spare empty wine bottles with tall tapers! Sent someone out for massive quantities of ice, as these outages ONLY occur on the hottest day of the year, and I had to keep the food in the reach in cooled down with bus pans of ice) when the power came back up, I manually entered the information into the credit card machine for approval. Only two cards were denied, (in which case, every day I manually entered the information, until the customer's balance would accept the transaction.) If I had had Ma Bell, I could have avoided a lot of this.( Not the ice thing.) Ma Bell WILL NOT install a seperate line for situations like this IF you already have the wiring done (which you will) for any other phone company system. It's Ma Bell or nothing. After that, I got rid of the new fangled phone system, because one can only BUY their new fangled phones (for the price of your first born) from them in case one goes kablooey, had Ma Bell come in and rewire, and then purchased just REGULAR phones at a great savings from a local office supply store. |
