A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal Do you check your emails before sending them? Re-read a dozen times but still that typo sneaks through? Welcome to a Who, Me? in which a reader learns that one mistyped letter can result in a visit from the legal department. Our tale, from a reader Regomised as "Ali", takes place nearly 20 years ago, when he was in his first ( …
As an ex Tech Support Manager my job was to keep the senior managers off my team until we had resolved any issue.
1/ what went wrong
2/ Push an all user comms out to explain there is an issue and its being worked on
3/ Identify the fix
4/ Impact assess the fix, including looking of the risk of making it worse involve senior stake holders and audit if required
5/ If the fix will take a while push put another comms
6/ Take whatever backups are required to protect the data
7/ Apply the fix
8/ Perform return to service tests
9/ Issue a comms to let users know the service is now available
10/ Internal Team incident review
11/ I report back to senior management
Individual engineers were always protected, my team, my problem
I managed my teams like that which worked well until the Council IT top tier management team changed.
Obvious failures by my team members were resolved and owned, as one does.
The new "managers" were not up to their roles as we accidentally exposed time after time, so they used any failures as an excuse to shuffle me out (downgrading, dead end career progression, reorganisation etc).
They then promoted the worst members of my team into the team leading roles.
Karma being what it is, the management team all went on to enjoy massive salaries and pension benefits whilst the service and standards provided by the Council declined from the best value in England ( or thereabouts when I left) to the lowest levels possible.
It was always someone else's fault and they were such good managers they had managed to recover from some of the issues etc.
I can quite easily understand them taking hours to figure out how not to accept any liability at their level and getting that aspect sorted first before actually looking at the problem and ways to resolve it.
"Makes you wonder why you bother, doesn't it?"
No, not in the least though that sort of thing is rather disheartening when it happens over and over for thirty-odd years.
All it takes is one happy customer to squeal with glee that she wants to have my baby [extreme hyperbole but the meaning behind it was clear, she was a little bit grateful for my help] to make the entire Helldesk experience well worthwhile.
A few others, scattered randomly across the decades of various IT Support roles, add strawberry bits to the normal tapioca of life. It does not take much of a "thank you" to brighten up a week and they are all remembered.
Be nice to your Support guy, it may be the only time he ever gets thanked for his efforts.
For sure, manglement mostly won't.
Also been on calls with 10 managers and only 3 techies. Usually a routing problem (network engineer here) so put my phone on mute and then fix the problem before saying anything.
The worst call was when someone cut the main BT lines from Cambridge to London (they were building the Stansted junction on the M11) and a man with digger…. We found that both of the “diverse” internet lines went that way the conversation went something like.
Manager: we have got to get this fixed now
Techie: what do you want me to do, until they fix that cable nothing is going to work and the isp can’t change it for a week.
Manager: we must do something
Techie: you can call the isp and ask them but there isn’t anything they can do.
A month later we had the isp divert one of the links to another town to avoid this again.
Back in the days of multimedia I managed to name and send a file ready for a CD pressing as "company name porno". I ought to have called it promo.
Fortunately the nice people at the CD plant called me before making 1000 copies.
This typo was missed by a few other people including the client. What was I thinking?
I once sent a final email to a German customer that I had fixed a load of issues for, and instead of typing something along the lines of "if I can help you further, please don't hesitate.........." what was actually sent was "If I can help your Furhrer..........." That was a difficult one to deal with.
A former boss of mine many years ago sent an email to a customer, CC'ing me, that began "Dear Angus..."
Except he fumble-fingered it and left out the 'g'.
I sprinted round to his cube and panted out as quick as I could "Recall! You need to recall that mail!"
"Why?"
"Look at how you addressed him!"
Cue boss (who was, in fact, an awesome guy) turning a very pale colour and frantically trying to locate the Outlook "recall mail" button...
Actually, as I recall, the customer in question was very good-natured about it, as it wasn’t the first time he’d been inadvertently addressed that way by other parties. The relationship with the customer, having sunk to the bottom, recovered. My boss did not have to commit ritual seppuku with his red Swingline stapler, and learned a valuable lesson about spell-checkers (“just because it doesn’t have a red squiggly line under it, doesn’t mean it’s the right word…”)
When I was a kid my father almost printed thousands of Desk Dairys for the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. The artwork had been through numerous hands at both his company and the LCoC before some schoolboy pointed out that's not how you spell diary.
I wonder who he was. ;)
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I remember at a former employer the monthly staff newsletter had a profile of a colleague in it. His interests were supposed to say he was interested in "martial arts". Various members of staff assumed he must be some kind of pervert when the T and I were transposed...
I was the General Manager of a business, but for marketing reasons called myself "The Principal Chemist". When we advertised a technical job we typically got 200-400 replies. A harsh, but necessary, filter was that anyone who addressed their application to the Principle Chemist was not considered - The jobs involved writing legally enforceable technical reports - It probably removed 20%.
A very valid way of filtering down applications to review. Previously we advertised for a Sen. Test Analyst:
Please provide CV and covering letter explaining why you are suitable for role, etc.
83 applications culled to 7 due to lack of letter. When apparently unable to read instructions like this, doubts are raised over their abilities to read requirements for testing...
Commentary on my title ("Principal Consultant") ran from "your title is misspelled" and downhill. I thanked them all and signed using the same title spelling.
In one patient case, 3 exchanges took place before a phone call came (obsessive compulsive?) I had no choice then but make the referral to the dictionary.
As I recall, in the sequel book Maskerade, in which King Verence had finally succeeded in buying the actual Marital Arts publication, Nanny Ogg had wandered into the royal bedchamber and spent an amusing half-hour drawing spectacles and moustaches on all the illustrations.
Verence was subsequently heard to have been enquiring of his courtiers where he might obtain a false moustache...
I think we may have wandered off-topic a little here.
I remember the marketing manager/co-owner of a place that I worked at utterly red faced when she walked up to me and showed a flyer that we had sent out the week before to promote one of our products with a special offer:
Buy 5 for the price of 6.
We had to laugh at that one, not least because none of us had noticed it but also because absolutely none of the recipients, even those who called to take advantage of the offer, mentioned it either!
Likewise, the "nearly out of date" stuff in the supermarkets. Often marked down, but sometimes actually more expensive than the in-date stuff on the shelf where there happens to be a BOGOF or similar offer running. And that's not even an error. It's just the way the "system" works!
I have two tripe-ing errors to admit. I did once send out an 'important massage' in the title of an e-mail to the whole organisation which led to a few warning words (but many laughs) - don't rub it in!
I also did intend to say in an e-mail to a woman colleague that 'I knew she must be busy' but managed to hit the 't' and the 'y' simultaneously (it didn't come out as 'busyt'). Fortunately, she had a good sense of humour and my hurried red-faced phoned apology was accepted with a chuckle.
One of our overseas companies uses a local ERP system, called SQL. Why it's called that I don't know as it has no relationship (excuse the pun) with what we consider as SQL, with no external database and no export mechanisms beyond saving reports to CSV files.
As we're looking to replace it I'm fed up with explaining, "It's SQL but not the database language!"
Perhaps YourSQL would have been better?
What? Change his daughters name?
"MySQL (/ˌmaɪˌɛsˌkjuːˈɛl/) is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter, and "SQL", the abbreviation for Structured Query Language."
Seems he has form for picking silly names for things that are likely to cause confusion then.
"I'll name my daughter after the first person possessive pronoun in one of the world's most widely spoken languages, that will cause absolutely no confusion with all the people in my chosen profession who will commonly be from other countries and will communicate almost entirely in that language, because nobody else understands Finnish, and English is the lingua franca in the Western world."
Going on to name your RDMBS after your daughter, when almost everyone who uses it is going to understand English better than they do Finnish is really just compounding that mistake.
Oh, and the name "My"? It's not even a traditional Finnish name, it was invented by Tove Jansson for a character in the Moomin books...
Little My is the only (other) one I've heard of. If I'm thinking of the right character, I would call her a little...... difficult.
I suppose that paradoxes are thematic for a Finnish startup... and I think "Paradox" was taken.
"Really it should have been called the non-possessive-pronoun-specific One'sSQL, with a special dispensation for avoiding the apostrophe but not the esses..."
I believe there is a specially crafted version used to manage the Royal Diary call OnesSQL.
The first version of Microsoft's SQL server for Windows was released in 1993. MySQL was first released in 1995. There were versions of Microsoft's offering for OS/2 before that, and it was previously known as Sybase SQL Server before Microsoft bought a licence that allowed them to fork it.
"The first version of Microsoft's SQL server for Windows was released in 1993. MySQL was first released in 1995."
Yeahbut, when did "Microsoft SQL server for Windows" officially become MSSQL?
I quick search seems to report it's Microsoft SQL Server in most places. MS themselves seem to refer to it simply as SQL Server on their download pages and the various tools as XXXXX for SQL Server etc. So the reality is that only techies referring to it in a common, unofficial shorthand call it MSSQL and therefore allowing for the possible confusion by one letter with MySQL.
Then there's the VISIO-like diagramming software called... "dia"
Presumably the users’ group is called diatribe, and the custom integrated silicon for linking installations together is dianetICs?
Yes, I’ll get my coat, those puns were awful even by my own low standards.
Indeed, and my sainted grandmother, God rest her soul, would embarrass my mother by loudly and obliviously asking in shops for that shade of shoe-polish well into the 1990s.
On a related note, I saw recently that a certain type of birdseed here has been renamed to "Nijer" seeds, to avoid linguistic confusion.
This appears to be an urban myth. The only pictorial example of it is dubious.
There were undoubtedly 'n-word' brands, including e.g. 'n****r's head stove polish', but 'n****r brown' seems to be apocryphal. (There was a sportsman called Brown whose nickname was the n-word, though, so perhaps there's just no evidence of the brand on the internet, or perhaps that's where the story comes from.)
This appears to be an urban myth
Not so. I'm old enough to remember n****r-brown being used, I think for the colour of a dog (which is consistent with the Guy Gibson usage). The word was already offensive, and the people using it were probably middle-aged.
My wife, who is American, tells me that when she was young the name for liquorice sweets similar to Pontefract cakes was n****r-toes. I don't suppose that was the name on the packet.
Was it a nickname, or on the packaging?
I find it odd there are no pictorial examples on the internet. Perhaps this one's a bit like the 'no dogs, no blacks, no Irish' signs that everyone thinks they remember, but don't appear in contemporary pictures - it's thought to be such a perfect summation of the real thing that people 'remember' it in place of the specific racism they experienced.
This appears to be an urban myth.
Nope. Back when my age was in single digits (50s & early 60s) my parents ran a shop with a haberdashery(*) section and n[deleted]-brown was a very common sewing thread colour. I also remember it as a shoe polish colour. This was in the UK.
(*) Not a word you come across much these days.
"There was a furniture catalogue that managed to misspell the colour of a sofa that was supposed to be “Niger”."
Years ago I had to update the articles of association of a Dutch public transport research organisation. When proofreading my work I suddenly realised that both the original translator (v experienced) and their proofreader (also v experienced) had overlooked a missing letter L in at least one occurrence of 'public'.
This was in de days of WordPerfect so I could exclude that word from the main spell checking dictionary, to avoid making that mistake myself. (Though I've made plenty of others :) .)
Incidentally, I get the impression that in Microsoft Word you can only delete words from your custom dictionary, not the main dictionary. Any thoughts on that?
"[...] a missing letter L in at least one occurrence of 'public'."
IIRC the 1964 "silent" film "A Home of Your Own" used that as a throwaway visual joke with Bernard Cribbins as a stonemason. The film is a 45 minute showcase of visual jokes from at least ten recognisable comedians of that and later decades.
The plot of the film is probably still relevant to new house builds nearly 60 years later.
There is an IMDB entry listing cast members. A few names elude me - but their faces were probably recognised as character sketch members .
It was a surprise that the whole film is not on YouTube.
Combine the cast with that of "The Plank" and you get a fairly comprehensive list of comedians from that era. There is also the golfing one "Rhubarb, Rhubarb" .
It was a surprise that the whole film is not on YouTube.
Checking in a few days later to say that I have happily been able to locate a copy of it, by a means that rhymes with "litwarrant". There was, it seems, one and only one person kind enough to be sharing it. Now there are two. I shall enjoy watching it!
This is a pretty common error. I've even had a few come my way over the years. It's the result, often, of managers who don't like to communicate with, let alone be responsible to,underlings trying to be as concise (i.e. brief and uninformative) as possible when forced to by some crisis that they've caused themselves..
It's something I noticed a long time ago serves as a flag for people over-caught-up in faff or "noise", running a bit past their comfortable capacity for dealing with lots and lots of little things. They elide the most important word in the sentence. Quite common in central London.
And Microsoft GPO logic doesn't help on that:
"Disable the deactivation of <whatever>" -> Activate or not Disable that GPO, whatever I actually want, I cannot see... How I hate such triple-nai GPO to end up in a yay... How much time is spent on analyzing such riddles, and how often a "Try with test machine, and then deploy" is faster than trying to analyze that gibberish...
I am bashing M$ here since that is where I earn my money and work most with, but I know the other two well spread OS-es are not better in that regard...
Negation is something that automated translation can screw up pretty effectively as well. If you're translating "blind" (i.e. into or from a language you have absolutely no knowledge of), it is not unknown for Google Translate to "reverse the polarity" as it were, and for you to be none the wiser. This is more common when the grammatical structure of the two languages are quite different (for example, Chinese into French).
I was once tasked with creating a networking diagram that was required for some Financial Services regulation. My draft copy had a label for one of our connections as "PISSNet WANK Link" as a joke. My final of course had "PSINet WAN Link", can you guess which one I sent?...
That blunder with a single character can lead to many woes. A fellow worker, unsatisfied with his lot, decided to email his CV to a recruitment agency. Rather stupidly he did so from the work email system, something like - To: info@recruitment-agency.co,uk. Note the very subtle transposition of a full stop to comma, so the email bounced. But yes, there was a company wide alias called UK - so that everyone, except the recruitment agency, got a copy.
With old age and repeated bad experiences I've developed caution regarding blindly hitting Alt-S only to realise I hadn't included something... or worse.
Gotten into the habit these days of leaving the address fields empty until the very end (or even emptying them and re-adding the addresses for replies) for important emails, just so I get those few extra seconds after I finish writing the email and then set who it's going to to realise what if anything needs changing before I hit send. Has saved me multiple times.
You’ve just made me realize that a good April Fool’s joke would be to install a font where (for example) the T and G glyph appearances are swapped. Would drive the victim mad wondering why those two keys on their keyboard have apparently switched places, not to mention the hilarity when others quesgion ghe weirdly-spelg email messates…
Are road signs. Both the ones stuck on poles and, especially, those painted on the road. I'm sure we've all see the news reports, or experienced them at some stage so I'll leave for others to relate any especially good ones. Although IIRC there was one where someone needed a sign translation into Welsh, emailed the translator, got an Out Of Office Reply, thought that was the translation and duly had the sign made up and installed.
Testing out an internal mail system at a former employer, I created a series of utterly hilarious (well, I thought they were) mails to send to a select few people, with a similar sense of humour. They contained plenty of swearing and several not very complimentary remarks about various managers.
Naturally, I screwed up and sent 'em to everyone in the company.
Wow, that was fun. I got the mother of all tellings off from one of the department big wigs (who couldn't keep a straight face, to be fair to him) and a written warning.
On the other hand, I made a lot of friends that day, with many people saying it was the best laugh they'd had in ages.
We had HR in our big consultancy send out a spreadsheet to everyone.
Naturally everyone's reaction was to delete it because they sent out so much corporate buzzword rubbish everyday it was just noise to us. Until a few minutes later an email recall request came through, so everyone retrieved and opened the spreadsheet which actually contained all the salaries of the local office. Cue lots of comparing and managers flooded with meeting requests
I spent about 15 years as an independent consultant at the largest employer in the US, USPS. My classification was Senior Computer Communication Systems Architect. As a practical matter, I spent all my time down in the trenches cleaning up defects in international mail tracking systems.
A common event in a large internal email community regarded distribution lists. High level executives and managers love to call attention to themselves in cast of thousands meetings and emails to everyone who works under them. For their convenience they had their assistants concoct email distribution lists so that they could manifest their importance with a single keystroke.
Often problems arose when someone replied to one of the pronouncements. The reply would go to everyone on the list. Then there would be many replies to the reply, telling people to ignore the reply. This would create a kind of snow storm of useless emails that could not be stopped. Recipients had to discipline themselves to ignore everything related to the original email.
My job was to clean up problems.
Once I received an email concerning a sword that had been mailed that various inspectors had flagged as illegitimate in international mail.
I carefully investigated the issue and found that the email had been kicking around through the system for over a year. It was a hot potato. The original complaint had crossed the desks of over 100 people without any resolution. Further investigation revealed that the original complaint had simply been an inquiry. More examination of the email thread showed me that over time the issue had evolved into something that was precisely the opposite of what it originally had been.
I wrote a brief explanation of the issue to everyone, pointing out the timeline, the dead interest, and the reversal of issues. The reverberation stopped.
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