diegolewis.com

For the past few months I’ve been actively looking for a new job. During that time, I’ve read a number of articles related to a person’s web presence. I’d like to say up front, this blog and other social media accounts were not set up to market myself. There are plenty misspellings and most posts are not related to programming.

Enjoy browsing around and getting to know me. I can also be found on twitter and linked in. I choose not to have a facebook page.

Friday is my last day here at NorthShore. I wanted send a nice simple thanks to everyone for +3 good years and invite them for a beer after I leave. Sounds simple enough. I guess I was overdue for some email mistakes.

First, I spent a few minutes mentally going through the room trying to include everyone. Then, I realize an email just went out to the entire floor and I didn’t need to go through all this. I clicked to close the email out, only I hit send.

SH*T! I send out a recall on the message.

Well one mistake is OK I guess. I open up the email to the floor hit reply all, clear out the old message and hit “To” to open the phonebook because there are a few people I want to include who work elsewhere. Instead of To I clicked Send.

SH*T! SH*T! I send out another recall.

Finally, I managed to get out a good by email titled “third time’s a charm.” Of course, there are some people who didn’t get the previous 2 mistakes and will have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Then there’s everyone else who will remember me as the computer programmer that doesn’t know how to send an email.

Some times I’m simply amazing.

Until this week, I had had no experience with copyright take down notices. I wish I still didn’t. Pulling some PDFs off our site is no big thing but having to sit though 3 verbally abusive calls in 2 days just plain sucks. Yesterday, I received the first call. The woman calling had been bounced to a few people before she got to me. I was in a position to help so I gave her my phone number and made myself her contact.
Working on a site that has tens of thousands of pages and documents, over 100k by search count, I’m not familiar with the vast majority of the content. She gave the URL so I took a look. I had never seen it before. I pulled them off the servers while she started to lay into me over the phone. It was understandable that she was upset so I let it go. Once the docs were down, she started asking questions. Who put the doc up and how long had it been there? I had just deleted them so I honestly couldn’t say anymore. Even if I saw it, the modified date would be unreliable.
After the call, I talked to the content editor who emailed someone and I figured I was done with this. Two hours later there was another call. I hadn’t heard anything back and now the tone was less forgivable. Today I find out the content was purchased, there was no user agreement and this is at worst an honest mistake. I’m told whoever purchased the content lost sleep over it last night. Today’s call was just plain nasty. I was polite, as helpful as I could be and she wouldn’t let up. I’m out tomorrow so if she calls all she’s getting is my machine. I hope to never hear about this again.