9,300 Email Messages
Normally I don't work at night. Every now and then 'ya just gotta, and I figured I could get some stuff done without bothering anybody. The problem was, it wasn't *people* I needed to worry about bothering. LadyPatsFan had written a program that was busily working some magic on an automatic schedule. I was about to disrupt that schedule.Even if I *did* accidentally kill her program, it shouldn't have caused much fuss. But without getting bogged down in too many techie details, let's just say that her program didn't handle errors they way *I* would have done it. :)
When her program encountered the first problem, it sent out an "Error Report" email. That email was sent to everybody (eight of us!) in the department. And that would be fine, except that her program didn't stop. It tried again. It failed again, and sent email again. The loop was nigh endless. The "Error Report" emails kept coming. Our boss has his work email routed to his Blackberry, which means that every time he got an email it would beep. His Blackberry quickly started to sound like the heart monitor on a dead patient.
By the time the rouge program was identified and stopped, each of us had over 9,300 "Error Report" emails in our inboxes. We had a deleting party the next morning... it was surprisingly fun. When LadyPatsFan walked in, she came over to my desk and asked, "I made your blog, didn't I?" Of course you did, LadyPats... how could I let your shame go to waste? :)
posted by jeff.w.mcclung @ 8:15 AM
13 comments
13 Comments:
If at first you don't succeed, Try/Catch again...
Of course at my company we would royally roast the developer who took down the central database machine without notifying the clients unless it was during a maintenance window - but thats just how we roll :)
Well, since the developer in question is also one of the DBA's... and he *did* in fact notify the *other* DBA... "poo!" to you, Sweet Anony. :)
hehee - of course one could argue that my point was notifying the "clients" of the database not the other dba's. I guess you could think of it as Tulsa telling Jenks it was going to remove the bridge for a while but forgetting to post road closed signs or warn anyone in the newspaper that they should seek an alternate route (or time in this case) to do their commuting ( or processing). Of course I might be exaggerating the severity of the infraction a tad but you get the picture.
We'll let that slide though since you are correct that a try/catch system should probably prevent spamming people - you notice SHE doesn't have her pda hooked up to the email system? I wonder why......
Sweet Anony, are you saying you'd like to be our DBA? :)
'cause HAWT DIGGY I'd be on-board with having somebody take that responsibility. And since you seem to have all the answers... ;)
naaah I've just made all the mistakes :)
(except for sending 9000+ emails - that ones new)
Well I remember back in the day, when a certain developer had coded part of a companies download site on his local computer, when he left the office, someone formatted the machine and downloads were no longer authenticated, so they didn't download........ Back before the "God" code...
blog word, "comed", don't know if it was coming or going?
For the record, the developer Firebaugh is discussing is not me! I have not resorted to putting production code on my local workstation... not that the thought hasn't occurred to me, you understand...
Looks like you got 'it' in there. Good job. Question is... did anybody notice? :)
~Scruffy
I had to point "it" out. :) Reaction was a snarky winking smiley.
bbpphbhbphphphbphbhbhpbhphbp
better? :P
I also got those emails on my Blackberry. Now it is dead. The 9300 emails somehow caused my blackberry to physically break itself.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you were the one that did that heinous act!
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