Dear Stupid, I did not check the database field • The Register

Who, Me? Ah, mild readerfolk, welcome as soon as once more to Who, Me? by which Reg readers very like yourselves regale us weekly with tales of technical disasters of their very own making narrowly averted – and typically not averted in any respect.

This week meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Stan” who as soon as labored because the subscriptions and IT supervisor (an odd mixture of job capabilities if ever there was one) for a enterprise journal. Stan’s chief duty on this twin function was to handle the FileMaker database containing the names and addresses of the journal’s ~20,000 subscribers.

Because it was a enterprise journal, that database featured substantial overlap between the recipients of the journal and the gross sales division’s promoting contacts. The latter often are sometimes despatched free copies of magazines.

Each sorts of subscriber had been lumped collectively in a single desk that included an an infinite variety of fields, lots of them obscure.

Stan did not design this dastardly DB. He tells us it “had been managed by a succession of individuals with virtually no information of IT, together with the CFO”. He additionally realized that no person was actually positive why a few of these obscure fields had been used, or what they contained.

So the one fields Stan anxious about had been “title, road, postcode, city and ID.”

Then as now, journal publishers are all the time searching for methods to extend circulation and income. Someday, the boss was trying over Stan’s shoulder whereas he ready a run of letters to subscribers, and observed a area he hadn’t noticed earlier than: Name2.

“Oh, do we’ve got a second contact at a few of these locations?” the writer requested.

Stan seemed and, certainly, some 5 p.c of the Name2 fields did certainly comprise information.

He didn’t, sadly, test what that information was. However earlier than lengthy the writer had determined the 1,000 or so folks within the Name2 area all deserved their very own magazines.

“Simply duplicate all of the rows which have a Name2 and add them to the desk,” Stan was advised.

Stan did what he was advised and set about printing up ~21,000 subscriber letters to accompany the following distribution of the journal. He labored lengthy into the evening, printing letters, restocking the paper trays, taking the printed letters out and stacking them in packing containers to be taken to the fulfilment home.

Within the morning, a gross sales particular person wandered into the world, picked up a printed letter, and skim out loud the next greeting on the high of a letter:

One other was addressed to “Pricey get her drunk and she or he’ll do something”.

Stan checked the deal with on the latter letter. It was going to the sponsor of that very problem of that journal.

At this level – and never earlier than – Stan inspected the content material of that Name2 area. Amongst some precise names, some odd however benign feedback could possibly be discovered – and 23 extremely derogatory feedback.

All the 23 nasty “names” had been related to vital advertisers. Suffice to say it might be a really very dangerous thought for the meant recipients of these letters to open their mail.

Workers had been due to this fact recruited to undergo the 21,000 printed letters, discover the offensive ones, and destroy them.

When the CFO arrived, he was knowledgeable of what had (virtually) occurred. “Ah,” he stated, “some time again I renamed the Remark area to Name2 as everybody was simply utilizing it to place within the title of a second contact.”

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