Moment of Supreme Power or How I crashed an entire corporations' email system

My fellow computer users may find this amusing:

I have an external email address at work for volunteer recruitment – volunteer@city.kitchener.on.ca.

Three years ago, I had our computer blokes set up an automatic response to this email address, stating to anyone writing that I had received their email and would respond shortly – a courtesy thing.

Today, my automatic response hooked up with a sender’s out of office notice, and got into an endless loop. I went to lunch at 12 noon, got my hair cut, did office errands, came back at 2 pm and there were 30,959 emails in my inbox. To make matters worse, the endless loop had crashed the entire email system of the Corporation – including internal and external emails. I.T. could not alert anyone about the problem because they couldn’t send an email either. Neither could the mayor, the CAO or anyone else. Everyone in our department was in a snit, running up and down the halls complaining.

I noticed my inbox immediately, and called IT and they tried to fix it. But only after they tried to blame me for the problem. Until I pointed out that they had set up the protocols for that automatic response themselves - I had nothing to do with how it was set up.

When I left at 5 pm, I still had 9059 emails left in that inbox.

I never did tell the people in my department the reason why their emails didn’t work. Or anyone else, for that matter, except I.T.

LOLOLOLOL

Upon reflection, I realize that today was the one day, the one moment, actually, when I actually had real POWER for the first time since I started working there in 1982 … Smile…

Little Lulu strikes again...