ENMU hopes to have phone system up Friday

PORTALES — There’s a busy signal throughout Eastern New Mexico University, and crews are busy trying to fix it.

University officials are hopeful phone service will be back up on Friday morning, three days after it first went out of service.

Clark Elswick, the system chief information officer for ENMU, said crews with CenturyLink are working on the assumption the phone system was knocked out due to heavy rains that hit Portales on Tuesday. But Elswick — talking via cell phone — added the ongoing precipitation has made diagnosing the problem difficult as well.

The outage affects around 1,000 phone lines on campus, whether it’s the financial aid office, a fax machine sitting in any office or even a phone currently sitting unused in a dormitory room.

In the interim, Elswick said, ENMU staffers are using a combination of cell phone calls, text messaging, email and other online services to communicate with each other and the public. Numerous departments have posted to social media indicating they can still be reached via email, as well.

But plenty of business is still done by the landline, and all the text messages and social media posts in the world don’t help when somebody out of town, unaware of the phone problems and not following ENMU on social media, dials and gets a busy signal every single time.

“A lot of people have the information desk number memorized,” Elswick said. “Most vendors have the telephone numbers, as well as some students. There’s still a lot of frustrated students and outside vendors. Right now, if somebody calls, it sounds like a busy signal. CenturyLink hasn’t been able to add anything to the message telling them lines are down.”