Calling a co-worker

[JennaE]

Hi.  Working in a call center, is there a way to call a co-worker without changing our status from Ready to Not Ready-Forced?  Ex: when I call a fellow employee, we both go from being available to take a call to Not Ready-Forced, and we need to be able to stay Ready for incoming calls.  I've tried calling from the address book in Contact Center, under contacts, and manually dialing the extension, but all options force us into Not Ready.  Thank you in advance.