I'm in IT. Les was a genius, in comparison to some who I've worked with.
A year or so ago, our office phones were through Verizon, as were all of our cell phones. Verizon had a major outage, knocked everything offline. (turned out some idiot cut an underground fiber line, took down most everything that was local to the cut)
The Fool Who Is Our CIO couldn't understand why we couldn't just pick up a phone and call for help. And why it was taking so #@%#@%# long to fix. We wound up wandering down to the local Verizon store, they were as much in the dark as us. Everything was fixed by the end of the day, but there was a lot of needless pain and drama associated with the outage.
We just worked through setting up a new plan, changing carriers, putting in backups, etc etc. This issue came up (of course). The Fool Who Is Our CIO, still doesn't really understand what happened, why we couldn't make calls, and why it took so long to get updates / get the problem fixed. VP of the company we're going with for a replacement approached me offline (I've worked with him for a good while)....said "Is this guy for real, or is he just pulling my chain, here?"
Sadly, I had to admit that, yes, the Fool Who Is Our CIO, was serious.
You realy need to replace his office phone with a home phone. Use the same lines. SARC