One of my past projects at Theradoc has been to create a system for delivering lab results to physicians pagers. The project has been labeled “High Volume Alerts” because of the large number of lab results that are received each day. We needed a system that would correctly format the results into a compact, readable format. It was a realatively straight forward project, with only a few gotchas, including tweaking the message to get it to look just right.
During the course of testing I was using the companies pager to receive the alerts and check their formatting. The thing was constantly going off and giving me plenty of samples to compare for accuracy. I would frequently fill the pager memory to capacity and have to delete all the messages out to receive new ones.
The project finished and was added to the new release and I didn’t think anything more of it until the other day. My supervisor in passing asked me if I’d heard about the last pager bill. “Nope” I replied, not seeing the connection that you have probably already made (given the title of the post and the fact that you probably think of these things). “It was $500 for the last month.”
*blink*
*blink*
*swallow*
“WHAT!?!?!?!?!”
Yeah that’s right, it turns out that the pager provider that we use has a limit on the number of messages that you can receive each month. The cap is 300 messages and then it’s $.15 per message after that. That means that I sent over 3,333 messages over the limit. Did I mention that it was a High Volume Alert? Well after giving me a few moments to worry about a $500 deduction from my next paycheck my supervisor assured me that it would be allright. They are going to dispute the charges, but even if that doesn’t turn out it is a good lesson learned. So besides being the butt of the jokes around the office for a few days (or longer), everything is going to turn out fine. Sure I’m embarressed, but it was an honest mistake and will NOT be repeated. (I’ll find something else to be made fun of)
Just goes to show you. Don’t go over your limits!
