Are you sure you want to send that?
Not long after starting work I ended up on the IT desktop support team, which involved looking after the trading floor for the bank. It took me a while, but I gained the trust and respect of the fickle teams I supported by keeping my promises, fixing important things quickly and having a sense of humour.

Unfortunately, my reputation was almost destroyed by one click of the mouse.

When I started out-of-hours support, I received a pager. Contained in the box was the device itself and a printed sheet with two similar phone numbers on it. I thought it would be prudent to test it so I logged in to Vodafone's website, entered my name --big mistake-- then sent a test message to myself with a cheery reminder (“Don't forget Andy's birthday!"). There was no 'Are you sure?' message, no warnings whatsoever, it just sent it. I was impressed by the fluidity of it all…

…until about five seconds later, when I heard beeping behind me. Then to the left, then to my right, forwards, in the distance... then phones started going off all around me. It was like the final scene of Lawnmower Man, when all the phones in the world start ringing simultaneously. "Who's Andy?" asked my colleague. Oh crap.

As I was based on the trading floor, I had a dealerboard phone with 40 lines. They started lighting up quickly, then my boss raised his furrowed brow over my screen, grinned nervously and whispered "chart cat, do you realise what you just did?"

I'd paged the entire' Priority: RED' distribution list. This is reserved for disaster management so it included the entire management team for the bank, the board of directors, head traders, front, middle and back office and the IT department. Worldwide. Around 3,000 VIPs in total.

Suffice it to say that I spent most of the morning and afternoon fielding phone calls from high-ranking, irate people who wanted to know who this Andy figure was and why I was abusing the alert system. One director in New York called me to complain that I'd woken him up for nothing, another in Singapore called to tell me how I'd ruined the expensive dinner he was enjoying with his wife. One chap sarcastically wished Andy all the best and offered to send him a ‘present’. I felt dreadful; my fledgling career looked like it was in ruins just because Vodafone didn’t distinguish distribution lists from personal numbers, or provide any kind of warning on its website. Then my mates got wind of the situation and began prank-calling me, which was exactly what I didn't need.

After about 5 hours of apologising and being made to feel very small indeed, interspersed with my friends doing their best to make me feel even worse, I'd had enough. I picked up the phone for what felt like the millionth time and on the other end was one of my mates, again, this time pretending to be the head of Global Data Centres. He'd made up some ridiculous name and was speaking with a particularly ludicrous voice, so I gave him a piece of my mind using as many swear words as I could cram into the rant as possible.

Sadly for me, it really was the head of Global Data Centres. I frantically checked our group directory and lo' and behold, I was talking to the top IT manager for the company. I’d called him a stupid, feckless cunt and insisted he stop wasting my time. To his eternal credit, he took my disgraceful, provocative and seething gross misconduct unbelievably well and told me to be careful who I spoke to in future, as other managers might not be so forgiving.

From that day forwards, I was known as 'Pager' until I switched roles (hooray for graduate training programmes!).
( chart cat has an itch, Mon 24 Sep 2007, 12:39, Reply)