Prima Donna

First draft of Prima Donna is done.  In this episode we see how easy it is to make very public mistakes with technology and how none of us are immune!

*** updated ***

Here is what I posted to reddit.  (Click here to up-vote.)

Hey folks; I'm writing a bunch of short stories based on my experiences over 25 years in IT.  Here is an excerpt from draft of my latest story...

….

I tried to log in to my email but the server was down.  “Your email working?” I asked Todd.

“It was but a summer student managed to take out the server,” Todd replied.  “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.  I can’t do much on my current project because I need the email servers and the messaging team has locked them all up.”

“Wow, what happened?” I asked.

Todd settled back a bit in his chair to tell the story.  “Well this girl sent a fund raising request to one of the corporate address lists by mistake yesterday.  This address list contained most of the people in the company.  So then everyone started replying to all saying don’t contact me, but they carbon-copied her boss, their boss, and now everyone in the company is cc’ing everyone else saying stop replying-to-all and whatnot.  This poor girl started an exponential, internal, accidental, denial-of-service attack.  The email guys can’t delete the messages fast enough and every time they bring the system back up it reignites like a forest fire in a drought.”

“I saw that and ignored it.  But that’s a great start to a career!” I chuckled.  “Does she still work here?”

“I don’t know, but if I were her, I’d be hiding,” Todd responded.   He paused and had a somewhat serious look on his face.  “We need to coordinate the fair dissemination of Dean’s office supplies.”

….

 “Hey email is back!” Jeff exclaimed.

I was feeling a bit anxious about getting back to work, but I wanted to keep talking with the dudes via messaging.  Banana Corp didn’t approve of instant messaging, so I had an idea to use old-school Microsoft network messaging.  “Hey do you guys know if the desktop messaging service is enabled?”

“By default no,” Todd said, “but it’s not like the desktop guys can get rid of it.  It’s a standard part of Windows.”

“Cool,” I said, “Turn it on and we can send each other messages.”  I got the okay from the dudes and I went back to my office.  To this day why I couldn’t use a phone I do not know.


Later that afternoon I got a message on my computer from Dean.  It was preceded by an annoying beep and a pop-up window.  Message from Computer01435: I just met with Anne and I’m clearing out.  Keep in touch bro.  It had been a while since I used the network message command.  I typed, net send /banana deano “Come to my office before you go.”  Then I heard a chorus of annoying beeps echoing up and down the hall.  Even though I was pretty far from the corner office I heard a burst of laughter.  Oh – my – god, I thought as I quickly walked down the hall.  On the way I noticed a few people sitting at their desks with puzzled looks.

When I got to the corner the dudes were still laughing.  On Todd’s screen I could see a pop-up window that read, Message from Computer01541: deano come to my office before you go.

“Forget a colon?” Jeff asked.

“It’s domain, colon, user – no space,” Todd said.

“I just sent this to everyone in the company, didn’t I?” I asked defeated.

“Yep, you spammed everyone online,” Dean chuckled.  “Let me know how many Deans show up.”

“Todd, you said it was off by default?” I said angrily.

“It’s supposed to be,” Todd said shaking his head.  “I guess the desktop guys changed the default to off recently and it wasn’t a retroactive desktop update.  So it would be more correct to say you sent a message to anyone who wasn’t recently provisioned with a computer.”

….