You're not kidding! I once worked with teams of field techs for a large american cellular operator who shall not be named. I'd have 3 or 4 teams in the field, and I was at a desk pulling marionette strings in the network for them.

To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."

"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"

"Those are expensive. No."

So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.

Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?