| Lurker turned member to post this. Second web related job at an insurance company, I was 20 years old at the time. We were heavy into online advertising, mostly banners at the time (this was right around when adwords started to get big). The company just bought out all of the MSN finance section of their site for the day-- it was a pretty big campaign ($100,000). We drove all the traffic to a landing page I had created with a short form to "Get a quote". IT had given me permissions to push things live for quick fixes and such, I made a last minute design tweak and, you guessed it, broke something. I was checking click traffic and inbound leads and realized traffic was through the roof but leads were non-existent. This was about 45 minutes after the campaign was turned on. I jumped on the page and tested it out and got an error on submit. FUCK. I literally started to perspiration INSTANTLY. Jumped into my form and quickly found the bug, can't recall what it was but something small and stupid, then pushed it live without telling a soul. Tested, worked, re-tested, worked. Ran some quick numbers to get a ballpark estimate on the damage I caused... several thousand. Stood up and walked over to the two IT guys, mentioned I borked things and that I had fixed it... what should I do? I can still see the look on their faces. Shock, then smiles. Walked back to my desk and about 10 minutes later my two bosses show up (I worked for both dev & marketing managers). They said thanks for catching the problem, not to worry. I did good for finding it myself, fixing it, and pushing it live. I was still sweating and shaking. They walk off and later that day marketing manager informs me MSN will refund us for the 45 minutes of clicks. It took about a month before I felt competent enough to touch our forms again. |