After a long, interrupted day at the office of phone calls and emails due to our mass mail blunder today, I decided that I was due for a late night michelada (for our non-drinkers: i.e. a Dos Equis Beer with tomato juice, a lime, and a salted rim). 

This week marked my fourth year at Thunder Data, and January thankfully always brings our only quiet time of year to catch up and tie all loose ends.  At this time every year, we find ourselves with time on our hands to better our website and reflect on the previous year’s business sales, goals, and practices.  So, it is here I have found the time to inspect our own site for needed updates to our portfolio, page enhancements, search engine optimization and other general improvements. 

Like a carpenter’s home, our own site has sat neglected behind the day to day work of our clients.  So, with my laptop, great pub grub, and a michelada, our site received much needed attention.

As a tech company, we’re supposed to “mind our Ps and Qs” among all things technical.  (As a tangent, the term “Ps and Qs” refers to both diligence in your work or minding one’s manners.  With roots in the old Brittish pubs and referring to ”pints and quarts”, the term was used when too much brew caused misbehavior.)  Today, after I carefully crafted an informational tutorial for our ThunderBits section, we sent it out to our mailing list.

We haven’t been particularly diligent about using a mailing list to market ourselves even though we strongly suggest that our clients use mailing lists to roll out product ideas, helpful hints, and updates.  So, here we are, starting our 8th year in business, and we’ve used the mailing list less than a dozen times–all without a glitch until today.

Wouldn’t you know that an email address on our own server had an “auto-responder” indicating the recipient was on vacation.  Her email responded back to our list, in turn spawning yet another email to the list updating them about our  party’s whereabouts.   As loops go, our gal on vacation received a second email from our list notifying itself that our gal was out, and another loop began.  And again.  Twelve times.

It didn’t take long for our phone to ring and our Inboxes to fill up with requests to notify us of the error.  Thankfully, we realized the mistake early and stopped it quickly enough that only 12 spam messages went out.  But the whole fiasco was embarrassing, and I hope this type of public humiliation doesn’t happen again.

With that said, I’m drowning my sorrows at Sherlock’s in Austin, but I promise that while I drink my pints, I’ll mind my Ps and Qs!