About 15 years ago I was head of IT at a CRM company with a dozen employees. We had developed our own CRM / Accounts / Sales tool internally, and were now starting to sell it into the industry. We had one really obnoxious customer that everyone referred to as a twat. Someone had inserted the word "TWAT" into his customer record notes, and the word popped up every time you entered his record to make a sale.
When we hit about 200 employees we started to cloudify our software, and offer it to our customers. They could log into their account, make changes, make orders themselves, check our stock levels and basically handle our back-office functions themselves to save us a job. Everything was fine until Mr Obnoxious logged into his account for the first time, and was greeted with the word "TWAT".
He rang to complain straight to the Managing Director who went ballistic. She emailed all department heads angrilly, wanting to sack whoever made the change. She enlisted the help of the IT department (i.e. me) to go through the audit trail to find out who it was. She intended to make an example out of whoever it was.
The news rippled throughout the organisation, everyone was talking about this wondering who made the addition, and waiting with baited breath for someone to be booted out the door.
An hour or so later, having restored an old backup tape (this was pre GDPR and we could restore from any time in the companies history), I parsed the log and found the person responsible. I printed out the log entry, and took it to my boss, the Financial Director. He looked at it, smirked, picked up the phone and rang up the culprit. The MDs husband, the CEO!.
Within 15 minutes anger had turned into laughter, as the board all agreed that the customer was indeed a twat, and the boss had made the note many years ago when he was practically a one man band working in an office above a takeaway, it had survived every revision of the software and he was now long since removed from the process that would have had him see the word pop up each time the account was brought up.
The MD then sent a mild follow up to employees, asking them to check all account notes to make sure that no other legacy colourful descriptions of our customer base remained and asking that in future notes were to be used as factual records, rather than containing opinions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
