Intercom Substitute

I have to be grateful to the civic administrators for encouraging and promoting my intellectual development and innovative thinking abilities. I know I have probably not managed to achieve much in both areas, but that is not due to any fault on the part of the administration. Let us consider the example of our intercom system.
We have in the institute an intercom system that has so many phone terminals, that no one can remember even 5% of the numbers. Fortunately they provide us with a list, which is correct in about 85% cases at any given time. After the building was repaired by heritage architect hand in glove with a world class contractor (should I have said 'jointly' instead of 'hand in glove'?), the intercom system was never the same as before. One by one the terminals stopped working. For one week now, 99% terminals have been dead. They would not be repaired because of one of the following reasons (I don't know which one, and knowing that would not help us anyway)..

1. The hand in glove duo had been paid fully. That probably did not leave them any incentive to work on the same things again.
2. The duo did not work on the same thing twice, just like lightening does not strike the same place twice.
3. Local engineers could not repair it because they had no layout plans or circuit diagrams (or whatever) required for repairing the network. The duo did not and would not (despite requests) hand over the diagrams.

To add insult to injury, a divine thinker in administration sent us a Fatwa that mobile phones must not be used in operation theaters. This was akin to the situation आई जेवायला घालेना आणि बाप भीक मागू देईना in Marathi, which translated freely into English would be 'mother would not feed us and father would not let us beg'. I hope you understand the father figure was the duo, and the mother figure was the divine thinker. You must understand that a father figure can be a duo in civic world, because anything is possible in the civic world. To overcome this problem, I thought of a solution, which many of you must have played with as children.

The contraption consists of two styrofoam cups, their bases joined by a strong thin string. One person speaks into the cup while the other person puts the other cup to his ear. Then they reverse roles. This system has a number of advantages.

1. Cost effectiveness: the styrofoam cups are thrown about by visitors everywhere in the campus, after they drink tea or coffee from them. Thus there is a free supply of free cups at all times.
2. Using the discarded cups can be counted as participation in PM's swachh bharat abhiyan, which the civic body has forced the employees to participate in.
3. The string comes with stationery supplied by the health university for conducting exams. I have to admit the supply is often short, and civic body may have to buy some string. But it is far cheaper than telephone wire.
4. The design is simple, and can be mastered by anyone who can do anything with their hands. Surgeons probably would do better than physicians. The patients who need occupational therapy can be given this task, combining their therapy with social service.
5. Repairs are not required. These contraptions are of the 'use and throw' type, which is the strategy on disposable medical instruments in all the developed countries.

There are some disadvantages.

1. There is no scope for anyone to make money in tenders etc.(Oops! Should that have been in the list of advantages? It must be my old age which is confusing me.)
2. If pigeons sit on the string (after getting tired of flying in our corridors), sound transmission can be interfered with.
3. If any unscrupulous person decides to eavesdrop on any conversation, he just has to put a hook on the string, and fix a styrofoam cup at the other end.
4. Connecting two terminals around bends may be difficult. But the civic administration has a few people who are very good at driving employees around the bend. They can tackle this problem very easily.

I am not going to suggest this to the civic body, because their strategy is to ask people who make brilliant suggestions to conduct a pilot study on their suggestions. They might even get angry with me for interfering with their utilization of the budget earmarked for intercoms. They can read my blog, and use my idea as their own. It would be a win-win situation. They would get credit without having to make any efforts, and we would get functioning intercoms.