The other day, I accidentally put my boss’ name and a phone-sex phone number on one of our Web sites at work.
This isn’t one of those passive-agressive things, like Oops! I “accidentally” watered all my annoying roomate’s houseplants with beer — this was an honest, if exceedingly unfortunate, mistake.
The Web site read: “For questions, contact [my boss] at 1-800-[number very similar to our 800 number]”.
If you happened to have questions last week, you called and a recording of a woman answered: “For some stim-u-lating conversation, call 1-900-[some sex line].”
My boss is a woman. Like the woman on the recording. Well, most likely nothing like the woman on the recording, but you, a customer with questions, wouldn’t know that. You could easily be confused. And much more confused after the phone call.
God forbid some dunder-headed somebody took the next step, oblivious, and called the 900 number, and will soon sue us for phone-bill damages. “But I had questions! It said to call 1-900 . . .”
The wrong number was up terrifyingly for about four days. That’s a whole nother story, about how our IT department is in New York while we’re in Minneapolis, and about how you have to send painstakingly detailed e-mails explaining changes to the Web site. Rest assured I asked, requested, encouraged, and demanded them to change the number every ten minutes or so.
Luckily my boss is super cool and understanding. Even if she’s not reading this right now: still cool! She actually found it funny. Funny and disturbing. We’d called the number a couple of times: we’d call, and she’d laugh heartily, and then I’d laugh a little, and then she’d stop laughing and say: “This has got to change.”
“Definitely,” I said, nodding vigorously. Then we’d listen to the recording and laugh again, etc.
7 Responses to Phone-Sex Snafu
WOW! The funny thing is that if that would have been discovered by some blog other than this one which then routed it around all over the country, you would have been embarrassed, yes, but I bet your registrations would have shot up :). People totally uninvolved with your industry would see the thing and say, I HAVE to go to that event.
So congratulations on a brilliant, ‘accidental’ guerilla marketing technique. We can all learn something from you….
So did you get it changed?
After I was done laughing and rereading and laughing again, I had to make note of the fact that your IT/Web setup sounds eerily familiar. I wonder if there is a global plot to make things as hard as possible for lay people (ahem) to change or fix things when they go wrong (even hilariously and business-boostingly wrong). Why do those guys make the big bucks?
And if any IT guys are reading this, I apologise. I should ask you directly – why do you make the big bucks?
Once I sent an e-mail to asking them to change the Web site and I sent all the copy from the page, a whole page worth of text, and I put the phrases and sentences that I changed in red text. I wrote, “To help you locate new text, I’ve put changes in red.”
The Web site went up with big blocks of red text. Sigh.
Oh, and they changed it, Matt, after a couple of days. Or it wouldn’t really be funny. Just sad. Comedy = tragedy + time.
Sounds like you have a great boss.
Great boss = Boss + reasonable competence level + sense of humor.
Oh yeah, she really is awesome — I would’ve fired me. That’s a good equation, btw, for great bosshood!
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