The Day I Spammed Roy E. Disney
… and lived to tell about it and what I learned from it.
One of the most fun job’s I ever had was when I worked as the webmaster of the Corporate Synergy website for the Walt Disney Company. I had the great fortune to land in the Corporate Synergy Department in which I reported to some amazing women whom I learned a lot from. One of the great lessons is the subject of this article.
Corporate Synergy had broad visibility across the company because the website I oversaw was responsible for disseminating corporate priorities across the company handed down by then CEO Michael Eisner. All other departments across the company used the information on the site to strategize Synergy opportunities that reflected the priorities.
Everything was going great, I had recently been promoted to the webmaster position, from Graphic Designer. Overnight, I went from creating pretty graphics using the Adobe platform to writing web applications in ColdFusion and SQL Server. I was trying, very quickly, to learn how to write SQL Server queries, and display the data in my web application. I read a few books and attended a 2-day workshop. I felt I was ready to go.
Then one day something went very wrong.
My manager asked me to send an email to all the executives about an important announcement that had just been sent to her. I had recently completed, and somewhat tested, an application that would query the SQL Server database for the executives’ email address, and automatically email a custom message to each one. Unfortunately for me, and for Roy E. Disney’s inbox, I accidentally wrote an infinite JOIN. If you don’t know what that is, its bad.
As soon as I sent that automated notification, my manager’s phone starts ringing, it was either the executive themselves calling or their administrator, saying that they are receiving “hundreds of emails” from us. I began to panic. And then the panic turned to out-right horror when my manager says “Sal, Roy Disney is on the phone, he wants to know why he is receiving hundreds of emails from us?” If you don’t know, Roy E. Disney is the nephew of THE Walt Disney and son of Roy O. Disney, former President of the Walt Disney company and brother of Walt. I felt the blood rush from my face and I recall just sitting there with my life flashing before my eyes as the thought that the nephew of the two men who built the theme park that had Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was calling asking ME what the hell I was doing? I later recall a quick thinking IT Manager running over and pulling out the ethernet cable from my server that was sending the emails, while I still sat there in silent horror.
An hour later, our Vice President arrived and walked into my manager’s office. After about fifteen minutes they call me in. I was positive I was about to be fired. As I entered the room, I remember they both had surprised looks on their faces. They greeted me and asked me to explain what went wrong to our Sr. Vice President who was on her way. That was the longest three minutes of my life. When she arrived, I tried my best to explain what I think went wrong with my badly written SQL query. To my surprise she started laughing!! Through her laughs, she says “We sent hundreds of emails to Michael (Eisner) and his team!! I bet they didn’t expect that today!” Then my other two managers joined her hysterical giggles. I didn’t understand why they were laughing, I still don’t. They ended up helping me make some calls to some developers and a DBA (database administrator) who helped me to understand what I did wrong.
The lesson I learned from their actions, including their laughter, was that when someone does something wrong, you invest in their education to lift them up to do better. As the person on the receiving end of that treatment, I recall dedicating myself to work as hard as possible for them.
