eFax Hell? 71
RH Wesson asks: "We use eFax to distribute a 3 page fax once a week to about 75 customers of ours. Yesterday we uploaded a postscript version of our 3 page fax instead of the usual PDF version using the eFax Manager on Windows. We started getting calls from our customers about a 300+ page fax of garbage (it was really postscript source) We spent hours with eFax requesting them to stop the sending of the garbage. eFax was never able to stop it, in fact we spent hours trying to determine if the fax was even in their queue. In short we lost a lot of business that day and managed to piss off ALL of our customers at once. We are going back to using a regular fax machine. Has anyone else had a situation where the danger of technology loosing you business outweigh the efficiencies gained?"
Once upon a time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, before the mailing list functionality was finished, the client called -- they wanted the password for posting messages to the list.
I told them no, because it wasn't done yet. They went to my boss, my boss said "give them the password", to which I said "okay, but make sure they don't use it yet, because it's not working properly. I don't know what would happen."
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), they ignored me. That night, they sent out a single-word email to the hundreds of people on the list.
The email said "test".
Unfortunately, the email also had, as a Word attachment, THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS OF THIS CLIENT. I can only assume (they never took the blame) that the owner of the company (who requested the password) wanted to "test" if the mailing list could handle attachments.
To top it all off, since the functionality wasn't done yet (and I was too naive to think they'd ignore my advice not to use the list yet), the mailing list was broken. The reply-to address was the mailing list's address, and the password feature was, unbeknownst to me, broken.
Every response to the "test" mailing (usually "why did you send me these people's addresses?!?") was automatically sent out to everyone on the list.
Uh oh.
This became a problem around 9am EST, when people started checking their email at work. By the time I found out about it an hour later, thousands of emails were flying around, lawsuits were being threatened, and our client insisted it was ME who sent out the test email. I felt especially bad for the webTV users on the list, who couldn't delete the mail as fast as it was coming in.
At the end of the day, I spend the entire week calling and emailing people to apologize on behalf of the client -- not because the client wanted it, as the client wanted us to tell the customers to GTH -- but because I felt so awful about clogging their mailboxes with garbage.
Lessons learned:
1. Always keep technology disabled until it's tested and ready to be run;
2. Never develop in a production environment;
3. Clients never listen, and never own up to their own mistakes;
4. People do genuinely feel much better when you apologize for your mistakes by phone than they do when you do it by email.
Clearly operator error (Score:4, Interesting)
Internet-based faxing solution are really good things(tm). I don't want a paper fax machine hanging around and I don't want to dink with faxmodem sharing and all that. I really like having everything show up in my Inbox, as I can receive faxes while not at my office.
I would read up on the capabilities of their service and beg them to let you come back.
-m
This is why you have a job. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, absolutely, every day. This is what most technology jobs are about. If technology was flawless, then most of us wouldn't have jobs at all.
And technology isn't flawless. In fact, alot of technology gets more and more complex every year. eFax is supposed to be simple to use, yet people still email me eFax attachments every year (Write plain text document in Word, convert the
In your case, it sounds like you or someone else in your company was too hasty to use PS formats instead of PDFs.
It's hard to tell if you simply misunderstood how to upload a
Re:Testing (Score:4, Interesting)
Why did you change something that was working?
Why did you not test something before it went live?
Why are you blaming eFax?
Why do you still have a job?
We all screw up but most of us do not broadcast the fact on
What I would appreciate as a customer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't send with eFax (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i (Score:4, Interesting)
Garbage-in, Garbage-out. The software cannot think of every possible error condition or mistake. Trying to do so like all the shitty Microsoft products do and lulling people into a false sense of security will turn out much worse than keeping them on their toes, never entirely trusting the software.
The engineers at my company always test their results. Always. No matter how advanced the software becomes, they will always test their results. Because it's very damn important that they're right. Important enough that they will always check. Period.
It is not the responsibility of the software to do your job for you.
Now, one could argue that it *IS* still the responsibility of eFax, if you had some sort of agreement with them. Any sort of SLA or contract, such that you were outsourcing this to them. In that case, eFax should be vetting every fax they receive by an actual human being. It would be trivial to glance at the phone numbers being sent to, the first few pages of a fax to make sure they aren't spewing garbage, and various other simple checks.
Trusting the software to do it is absolutely not the right way to do it. It will never be as accurate as a human. Humans have reasoning and logic. Software only has logic. No amount of logic will make something foolproof. Until someone invents a decent artificial intelligence that does bring some reasoning into the equation, that is the way it will remain.