How spam closed down a company
Grandad December 14th, 2006
I was talking to Ron last night, who is into all this Internet thing.
He designs sites and puts them on his servers and looks after the “www.whatever.thingy” things.
He has loads of contacts in the business and he heard this experience from a pal of his. I’m not sure of the pal’s name, so I’ll call him Fred. Fred also runs a web design company.
Ron is amused, though he shouldn’t be, as one of Fred’s clients has screwed up.
I asked him why he was so smug, so he told me his little story.
Fred has been looking after this client for years and the client is very happy. They are a very big company. They are selling stuff by the bucketload off the site that Fred designed. Especially now that it is the height of the buying frenzy.
Anyhow, it appears that this company has an accountant. Now this is your typical “Monty Python” accountant. He knows credits and debits and double-entry and balance sheets like the back of his hand. But he knows NOTHING about anything else.
Now the accountant has been receiving spam. Because he doesn’t live in the real world, he doesn’t realise that spam is a part of everyday life. He thinks he shouldn’t receive it, because it isn’t full of numbers and audits and VAT. So he decided to fix it.
He sent a fax to Eircom saying he wanted to change the company’s domain name over to them. Fred doesn’t know why he did this. Even Eircom doesn’t know why he did this. Apparently it makes no sense at all. It’s a bit like being tired of junk mail coming through your letterbox so you tell the postman you now live in London. It’ll stop the junk mail all right, but it’ll stop everything else as well. But the accountant had heard “somewhere” that this would fix his problem.
And it did fix the problem. The spam stopped all right. So did all the rest of the important e-mails that a company relies on. Their website disappeared too. And all the sales that were going on at the time.
So everyone in the company went berserk. Except for the accountant who was now happy because he had no spam. But the rest all ran in circles trying to undo the damage he’d done. But it wasn’t that easy, because the accountant said that he was happy now he had no spam, and he wasn’t going to undo anything he had requested. And the way he had set it up, only he could undo it.
I asked Ron if Fred shouldn’t be worried, because he was supposed to be in charge of the whole thing.
He said no. He said the accountant screwed up by meddling in things he knew nothing about. And Eircom got things wrong because they got completely incorrect instructions from the accountant.
So Fred was in the clear. And this is why Ron had a smirk on his face.
It was the first time he had ever encountered an accountant who would put a company out of business, rather than receive spam mail.
In the meantime, the owner of the company is having a short holiday in America, and he doesn’t know anything about this. Unless he connects to his website every day, which would be a bit silly if he is on holiday.
I hope he has a very nice relaxing holiday. I hope he winds down and returns to work fighting fit. He’s going to need his strength.
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This accountant,is he by any chance a relative of Bush.Ha!
It sounds like there are similarities all right.
I want something – I am going to get it – I am going to ignore all advice – I am going to do it anyway – And now I have created a mess, I’m going to sit back with an idiotic smirk on my face and say “f*ck you; I’m happy” – and the rest all suffer.
That sounds very like the accountant where I used to work… creepy, I thought it was just that guy. Anyway Grandad, sorry for the lack of a presence lately – hope your having a good holiday!
It is strange, but I think it is part of the training for accountancy. They are brainwashed so that they can think of nothing else. As long as the bottom line adds up then they are happy.
“My wife left me this morning, and the kids have just been arrested for drug dealing. But the figures add up, so I’m happy”
And John – you are forgiven for the lack of presence and presents. I’m having a great holiday thanks [I've just posted about it]. I hope you are too.
[...] Just to stick another litle ha’pence worth here. As i said before, I moved to BK a few years ago and never looked back. If nothing else, their support cannot be faulted. I had two incidents recently. One was where a major client completely f*cked up their domain. An accountant in the company got hold of the DNS settings and played around with them to avoid spam . I am NOT joking. [Grandad blogged about it]. Michele went way beyond the call of duty to try to sort things, even though it was nothing to do with BK. Yer a Star Michele! Another was when there was a mail problem on one of my client’s accounts. It started the day BK started their Christmas break, and it kept shutting down the account. Paul worked on it right up to and including Christmas Day. Thanks Paul. Yer a Star too. Now show me another company that provides a service like that…… __________________ curratech.ie | enniskerry.ie | Blog [...]