The Pig!

When I worked at the Sydney R&D office of a large, American technology company—way back in 2001—we had small ceramic pig that was awarded each Friday afternoon for the week’s most egregiously stupid act. There was plenty of material to work with, and it usually came down to a vote between three or four excellent candidates.

Pig Story One

I won The Pig once. We were developing a product that notified users of important events in a call centre. A feature was the ability to send SMS messages via a web gateway, and we had purchased 1000 message credits for testing and demonstration purposes. It was all fun and games until a certain Friday when I accidently left a test system up, generating events which our little program dutifully turned into SMS messages.

Unfortunately, I had just asked everyone to be careful with our 1000 message credits, as it had been difficult to get the expenditure approved.

Fortunately, we had just implemented a throttling mechanism, so only 300 or so SMS were actually sent to the test phone.

Unfortunately, the test phone had been turned off for the weekend, so all the SMSes were queued up in the phone company’s systems, ready to be delivered the moment it was turned on.

Fortunately, this was not really an issue because the phone company only stores SMS messages for a few days, so all we had to do was leave the phone off until Wednesday.

Unfortunately, an engineer had taken the phone to the U.S. as part of a big demo, scheduled for Monday morning. I was actually teleconferenced in when the engineer turned the phone on, and it beeped three times to announce the delivery of the first of the three hundred SMSes. Then it beeped three times to announce the delivery of the second of three hundred SMSes. Around SMS number five, the poor engineer admitted defeat, and turned the phone off.

Pig Story Two

To my mind, though, the most memorable pig award was made to Leah, a technical writer who was doing her best to put together a company newsletter. Leah had just finished a draft, so she fired off a quick email asking her new manager, Russell, to review it.

Russell wrote back within ten minutes. The font was all wrong (they were the company mandated fonts.) The colours were not right (Leah had spent hours on them.) The text was shoddy (a deadly insult.) In short, Leah was furious. She stewed for a little, then took her complaint to her team leader, Jenny. Jenny confronted Russell.

And Russell professed utter ignorance.

After some investigaton, it turned out that Leah had typed “Russell” as the “to:” address of the email. MS Outlook, helpful as ever, had chosen to send the email, not to her manager Russell, but to her friend Russell in Western Australia, on the other side of the country. Friend Russell hadn’t even received the draft newsletter attachment, but, for whatever reason, felt compelled to type out a quick, witty, and critical reply.

Leah must have blushed for a day.

Pig Story Three

I had completely forgotten about the Pig until, out of the blue, an email arrived from Kevin Chan announcing the sale by auction of the only-slightly abused figurine.

Here is the link to the page on eBay.. Auction closes December 8. Not your usual eBay treasure. It made me smile.

Classic Kevin Chan, right down to the $10.00 opening bid.

Know another Pig story or ten? I’d love to be reminded of ones I may have already heard, or hear others from before or after my time. Please mail me or leave a comment.