Who, Me? Greetings, gentle reader, and may peace be upon you, for yea verily it is once again Monday and unto Monday we render another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with confessions of technical mishap.

This week's confessor we shall Regomize as "Gabriel".

Gabriel was, lo these many years past, helping his church set up a system for distributing announcements by telephone. Rather than having a physical telephone dialling machine with a magnetic tape, the newfangled system employed an online service. All you had to do was record your announcement, upload a digital file to a server along with a list of telephone numbers, and the service would spread the word to the congregation.

Many are the wonders.

Before trusting the service with an actual important announcement, Gabriel decided to test it first. He found a random sound file on the internet - as it happened, a clip of disgraced former Washington DC mayor Marion Barry admonishing someone to "get outta my face" (WAV) - and uploaded that to the server, along with his own phone number.

It was perhaps not quite so poetic as Matthew 16:23, but the sentiment is similar.

At any rate, upon testing the system Gabriel received a call with Barry's recorded message, and he was well pleased.

Emboldened, he then set about equipping the system with its first real message: a notice of an upcoming funeral. He recorded the message, uploaded it to the server along with a list of phone numbers, and set it going.

Not very long afterwards, he received a call from the church secretary, who was troubled. She had been receiving calls from some members of the congregation, complaining that they had received calls from the church's phone number with "a rude message."

Gabriel's heart was saddened as he realized what had gone wrong.

You see, the online dialling service spread its workload over multiple servers, depending on the quantity of numbers it was programmed to reach for each phone blast. Uploading the file to one of them propagated it to others, as needed. All well and good.

But Gabriel's first message, sent to only one number, had only gone to one server - which had cached it. When the next phone blast came along, six servers were recruited, but the Marion Barry message was still in the cache on one of them.

The end result was that roughly one sixth of the congregation, instead of being invited to fellowship on the passing of one of their brethren, were instead told to get out of Marion Barry's face.

At this point, readers may wish to consult the good book - specifically John 11:35.

Since there was no way to know which congregants had received the rude message, the whole phone blast had to be re-sent. Along with, presumably, an apology.

And that after having made very sure that the cache was cleared first - a lesson Gabriel learned the hard way.

We're always keen to hear readers' stories of mistakes they've made on the job - whether trifling or of biblical proportions. If you have such a story, please click here to send an email to Who, Me? and we may feature it on some future Monday morning. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/02/who_me/