Nice Call Centre you got there… would be a shame if someone threw a particle effect at it.
It was a few weeks out from Christmas time 2001 — the world was, understandably, a little on edge. 9/11 had just happened, Afghanistan was being invaded by the entire planet and every tech worker was still keenly aware of the the dot com bust the year before.
I was working on-site at a Government agency that “provides financial assistance and employment services throughout New Zealand”. It too was a little on edge, it had just gone through a rapid amalgamation with another Ministry. Which I’m sure had nothing to do with the high-profile Employment Court case involving the former head of the agency.
The CTO or CIO (I forget which) of the agency was very, very anti-Microsoft. He proudly strolled around town wearing a Java bomber jacket, and where he could, removed, replaced or just downright killed project or system related to Microsoft within his purview. This meant every desktop in the organisation was loaded with Netscape Communicator — Netscape Navigator 4 as the default browser, Netscape Messenger for email and Netscape Calendar for calendaring.
Spacer Gifs where the least of our problems.
Lets add some Christmas cheer
We had a small space on the intranet homepage , typically used as “Ad space” for upcoming things — new updates to the main system everyone used, major policy initiates, that sort of thing.
Since there was nothing coming up in the dead zone of Summer/Christmas, somebody thought it would be a great idea to add some Christmas cheer — a Pohutukawa tree in a snow globe.
Truly some original new century Kiwiana thinking!
I was the only person on the team with a license for Flash, a casual disregard for how Actionscript actually worked and a level of optimism that only a puppy dog or a junior developer can possess.
I have a vague recollection at the time of being excited by “experimental” flash sites — these mainly consisted of simulating the Murmurations of birds, trying to recreate effects from the Playstation game Wipeout and far too much Joshua Davis.
So it might come as no surprise that I decided to add in a couple of features;
- Programmatic falling snow
- The ability to pick up the snow globe and shake it
We tested around the team and everyone we showed seemed to like it. High-fives and Mochachinnos all round!
Dude, where’s my call centre?
One thing this organisation had was an incredibly tight process on software releases. I once had to fill in half a dozen pages of release information, three weeks in advance, to roll out an updated screensaver.
The intranet however was different — it was just content that would get updated, nothing requiring a technical change process. So one summer’s morning we published the little flash snow globe on the intranet homepage, got a few compliments and continued on like nothing happened.
A few hours later, panic started to spread towards our general direction — something was up, something with the call centres? Hushed voices became louder. The change control manager became more and more confused. Something was locking up the call centre desktops? The desktops seemed to be completely out of memory?
Slowly it dawned on us — the machines we had were of a much higher spec than in the call centres. The people working often just left Netscape Navigator running in the background, on the intranet homepage, while doing their actual job. We never did that.
We had caused a massive memory leak and a meltdown at every call centre in the country.
Just before Christmas.
With a 350x350 flash snow globe.
The fix was simple — pull the flash swf off the page, replace it with a simple animated gif and get everyone to restart Netscape.
The lesson was forever. You aren’t the people using your system, even if you’re in the same organisation as them…
