| One of my personal favourites. Years ago I worked on a stock control system for a popular clothes retailer. Where previously store managers had to spend hours on the phone ringing the depots to see what was in stock and reordering popular lines, now they could fill in orders an they would be emailed to the depots in machine readable format, with the order balanced across multiple depots depending on availability of stock. After the system had been in operation for a year or so, managers started to complain that some orders weren’t turning up. After a bit of digging it only seemed to affect one particular depot, but I couldn’t initially see a common factor between the orders. It had nothing to do with the size of the mail, or the originating store. I could tell from the logs the emails were being formatted and supposedly sent to the depot, yet they never translated into orders. The system would silently fail after we’d handed the email to the depot with no obvious reason why. So I wrote a quick script to collect all the orders for a day from all the stores and compile a list of all product lines that were present in the orders that went missing, but not present in the orders that succeeded, just to see if there was a pattern. This turned up a few dozen items and after a quick visual scan of the product descriptions one stood out slightly, so I phoned the depot on a hunch. The depot had an anti-spam filter on incoming emails that silently dropped messages with pornographic words in the body or any attachments. The retailer had just received a new seasonal product line, which was selling well, and the product description was “bondage tights”. After getting the depot to whitelist emails from our system, orders for this product line started working. |