Insomnia

This morning, while I was shopping at the store, I was looking for product reviews on my blackberry. Every search I made on Google issued a warning about the site being potentially harmful to my computer. Even sites that I know or run had this issue. This was obviously a mistake on the part of Google. They issued an explanation about this error on their blog.

Basically, it was a manipulation error in the lists they manage of known bad sites. I am sure Google has procedures to ensure this doesn't happen but things like that still happen in spite of best efforts.

We fell victim to something very similar this week. While we were testing an upgrade to the software of one of our customer's web sites, we misconfigured the staging server and sent outdated notifications to a few hundred of their customers. This must have surprised the recipients and surely triggered a few customer service calls that they were not counting on.

What make this story interesting is that we had planned for this and had prepared a procedure for staging that made sure to neuter the notification service. A manipulation error in the server configuration caused all this planning to go to waste. After we had fixed our mistake and notified the customer to expect a few strange calls, we looked at what happened. It was clear that the mistake did not sit with one particular individual but was a failure of our internal communication for this staging procedure.

At least we learned something and we can fix our procedure. But today's Google issue makes me feel a little better about it. Even the biggest web company in the world has its bad days.

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We are currently redoing the design of the web site at work. Since we didn't want to use stock photography (we wanted to be more authentic), a photographer came to the office yesterday all day and snapped action shots of some of us.

The photographer would set the stage tell us to sit here and there and proceeded to take pictures. At one point, he turned to me and asked if I could go back to my desk and fetch some random papers and other office supplies to lay out on the table that we were using for the picture.

We put that on the table and he said to us with a wry smile: "Now, look passionate and happy and authentic". We all laughed and went on to perform exaggerated pointing gestures and striking phony poses worthy of an 80's Sears catalog.

And then, something interesting happened. François pointed at the random paper that I had brought from my desk and asked what project it was about. And that is all it took. We started a genuine, passionate discussion of this project. I went on to explain the customer's needs and discussed the various technologies that we were looking at. I went on to explain that the project was early in its conception and that it required a lot of investigation for some of the most innovative parts.

Then François and Sylvain started making suggestions and asking more questions and the discussion became quite animated. By that time, we had completely forgotten that the photograph was there. He had to intererupt our discussion to ask us to take a different pose.

I don't know if the pictures will come out good. But I don't think we could have faked a better passionate, happy and authentic than this.

Labels: work

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