USER command newbie

[Walter Vaughan]

What is the proper alignment in the stars to learn how to use USER properly?

Just for testing purposes I have in a sample file's input processing table @key 
processing like the following:

::user phone = /usr/local/bin/ssh ff at facetphone /usr/facetphone_utapi/bin/fp_cid 
-n -s -u person:
::phone = ph:
::msgbox ph:

What seems odd to me is
1) why cannot the user command be called from a variable?
2) why does "ph" only contain data for the first time it is encountered on a 
processing table? Moving record to record, ph is blank every time the user 
command is run. I could see that if I stayed on the same record, but moving from 
record to record?

SSH is configured properly... the command runs just fine from the command line.