NP. Whenever you get back to this project just send up a flare.
As I recall that's just a straight 9-25 pin cable. We did have to roll one of the wirepair and make a custom cable when we put a dial up modem in the equation. Wow. That made my brain hurt.

The old laptop is a good idea. We have a computer permanently attached to all our locations. That way it can serve as a SMDR terminal which will give you a call log that will write to a text file, you can remote to that computer from another location to make changes, and it also gives you an mp3 music source. If you use that as your music source though you'll want to set up a daily event in Win98 to play that playlist every day. Otherwise at some point the play list quits looping. Once we started having them relaunch the playlist every night automatically we ceased having that issue.