Welcome to MEL
by EighT BaLL
Southwestern Bell has installed a new system, the Mechanized Employee Locator.
This system provides access by telephone to the official company directory. Mechanized Employee Locator, MEL for short, provides name, phone number, address, department, and title information for all Southwestern Bellemployees. MEL offers a call-completion function that will automatically dial the number of the person whose number you search for. Although this feature is not really important for us, it could be used for certain purposes like dialing an employee long distance for you for free.
MEL also offers a reverse-search capability, meaning you can search for a person's name by using his or her phone number. This system is similar to a computerized "Yellow Pages" for Bell employees. MEL is available 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week, and can be called from any Touch-Tone telephone.
How to Use MEL
First you must have a MEL access number, which I have included at the end of this article. MEL has access numbers for 16 area codes. If yours is not listed, then you can use the 800 access number. Then follow the steps below and voilà, you have access to all of Southwestern Bell's employees.
1.) When MEL answers it will ask you to press the * button if you have a Touch-Tone phone or if you are on a rotary-dial phone it will then transfer you to the SWB switchboard. This is not good... so call on a Touch-Tone phone.
2.) After you let MEL know you are on a Touch-Tone phone it will give you four commands you can use to access employee benefits, or go through the employee directory, etc.:
3.) Now choose the command you want. I will describe each of them, although the employee locator is the most useful one.
0 - Telephone Company Benefits
If you choose the 0 command it will give you access to employee benefits for retired employees and current employees. If you choose retired employee benefits it will give you information about pension, medical, and other insurance matters. You can also report deaths. You can also change an employee's address.
This is not very useful, but if you had a good imagination you could really f*ck with some SWB employees.
9 - Quick Call Option
# - Company Functions
Enter a keyword or abbreviation, then pound #.
I have no idea what this is and really don't feel like messing with it. Besides, it doesn't look very useful...
* - Employee Locator
Enter a last name, then pound #.
Let's say you enter 'Jone' in, which would stand for 'jones' but you only need to enter in 4-digits, which are 5663, then #. It will then ask you for a first name. Say you put 'Sam' in, which is 726, then #. It will ask if you want to narrow the search by entering the state abbreviation.
You could do this but you would probably want to find all the matches. It will find matches for this particular entry.
- Call up MEL: 1-800-660-7635
- Press * to let it know you are on a Touch-Tone.
- Press # to do an employee search.
- Enter at least 4 characters of the last name, then #.
- Enter at least 1 character of the first name, then #.
- Enter a state (MO, AR, KS, OK, TX) to narrow the search.
- Press # to skip listing or to reverse search by number.
- Press * to cancel and re-enter.
Key Functions
MEL Directory