It’s been a bad day at work today.  We authorised a change to our filtering system which upset a lot of people, and then when those people complained, we pushed back against the complaints.  Bad news all round – a lot of extra work for my team, and lots and lots of unhappy customers, a definite big fat FAIL.

I should start by saying that up front I was in favour of the change, we actually thought that the change was already in place, and it was a surprise to us last week to learn that it wasn’t, so after some internal debate we raised a change to fix the situation.  However, minutes after the change went live this morning there were people calling in to complain that we had taken away some of their access, and that they wanted it back.  After about the third report of this I threw it over to our project team.

What I had hoped and campaigned for was that we would revoke the change, admit error, take it back and re-think.  What I got was a decision that this was policy and that we should run with it.  I instructed my team accordingly and we got on with it.

The end result was that each of us took call after call, email after email from people unhappy about the change, and we had to deal with it.  It’s easy to make unpopular policy decisions when you don’t have to deal with the consequences, isn’t it.  It’s a bad day when every call you take is from someone who wants your head on a plate and tells you that you’ve screwed up their day.

Come the end of the day certainly the folks in my team had had enough.  The change was made with the intention of furthering protection for children, which it does certainly achieve by denying access to the resources, but at what cost.  Sometimes you have to make a decision based on cost/benefit analysis and not based upon Utopian ideals that “everything should be this way so let’s force it to be this way,” it just doesn’t work.

Tomorrow is another day.