Me, me, me, me, me. Who gives a hoot about Goldman’s phone? I mean, besides my adult children who I’d like to believe care about how I’m doing and where I am. But other than that, what a self-centered blog post! Enough with the narcissism already.

Well, let me tell you what happened first, and eventually, I will come around to how this relates to 8x8 Voice for MS Teams.

So a few days ago, my iPhone screen went dark. It still seemed to be working, but the screen was black. Pitch black. To quote Nigel Tufnel of the greatest heavy metal band that never was, This is Spinal Tap, “I mean it’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none.” (Watch the clip.)

I then googled “iPhone screen goes black” and, of course, I proceeded to follow all the Youtube miracle cures that came up, including putting the phone in the freezer. Alas, my thawed freezer-pop iPhone refused to come back to life.

Fortunately, between daily backups and the 8x8 softphone on my computer, I had both peace of mind and the knowledge that my daughters would be able to reach me if needed. But I still needed a new phone... ASAP. And I wasn’t super-thrilled that my barely 3-year-old iPhone had already given up the ghost.

Naturally, I briefly considered moving to Android. My daughter had switched and said it was just fine. I also know that in reality, the difference isn’t that great and plenty of tools exist to ease the migration. But, truth be told, I didn’t want to be bothered with even the relatively small learning curve to make the switch. Just restoring my backup to a new iPhone would be enough of a pain in the tuchus for a day.

That brings me back to 8x8 for MS Teams. I get it: you have employees who are already using Teams and adding voice services using a 3rd party dialer like 8x8 isn’t really that hard. It’s just a dialer, after all. Do you know what is even easier? Just dialing from MS Teams itself. This is exactly why when you add voice services to Teams, you shouldn’t have to settle for a separate dialer and 8x8 makes it easy for you to get 8x8 telephone services worldwide while using the MS Teams dialer. It is all invisible to your end-user. The bottom line is that you don’t want to switch out of the tools you are using every day if you don’t have to.

In the end, I bought another Apple phone so I didn’t have to make a change either. And I have to say, the new camera on the iPhone 11 is amazing. Oh, by the way, I can also run my 8x8 softphone on it as well. So all is good in the Goldman household once more.