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Comment by SoftwarePatent | Hacker News Reader

patio11, you're usually right on the money, but not this time. While it is true that the programming mistake was probably small, the end result was catastrophic for these parents. I would ask you to step back and reevaluate your "take on consensual reality" in this case. And at what point did anyone consent to being marketed to as grieving parents?

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Let me try to rephrase to tell you what I meant with that sentence, which I was attempting to phrase delicately. The reason why a line manager might not immediately say "It is probably true that someone claiming we addressed a letter to his deceased daughter means that we actually in fact addressed a letter to his deceased daughter" is because that line manager has to deal with many calls every month from people who are mentally disturbed. For example, I was once accused by a customer of being a CIA operative who hated Muslims because his pencils were late. His pencils had arrived on time.

Skepticism about the father's claim was a mistake, but it's not an inconceivable mistake to me. After anyone at OfficeMax had realized that the allegation was true, my ideal state of the world is that the CEO is on the phone within 5 minutes.

This is getting conflated with two other issues:

"Did OfficeMax actually intend to send this letter?" No. Of course not.

"Does OfficeMax having created a system which allows this letter to get sent mean that OfficeMax should fix the system?" Yes, OfficeMax should identify and fix the bug which allowed this to happen. In contrast to many people, I believe that the type of bug which caused this is likely rather minor. I would not agree that e.g. this letter is by itself a persuasive case that direct mail is evil, for example.

I have to disagree - this is hardly 'catastrophic'. A troublesome or even traumatic reminder, but a catastrophe? It's a pretty low bar for that word.

Somewhere along the line we got the idea that nothing negative must happen to us, and if it is, it's the worst thing ever. We're not that fragile. It's not a nice experience, but neither is it life-destroying.

I used to work in IT recruitment, and had CV's coming at me every day. One particular candidate popped up in my database search who possessed the rare skill that I was looking for. Her last CV in our system was 3 years old. Anyway, I called her up and asked if she might be still in that field. It turns out the call was made in likely timing. She had just been divorced and explained that she was looking to get back into the workforce after being a homemaker for the past 3 years. I added a note to the call log for other recruiters who may see her record saying "Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry. Definitely worth interviewing!".

Now lets imagine that the agency I worked for was sold/aquired at some point and eventually resulted in a mailout being performed on the database.

You can imagine the result if the comment field was accidentally included in the mail-merge, or some substring of it;

"Dear Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry, have you considered funeral insurance?"

Pattio11's point is quite valid.

Edit: Sorry, hit the wrong 'reply' button. This post was meant for the parent

Agree, in fact if this happened to me - given that I work with some of the systems that could give rise to such things - I would probably be more amused and curious to find out what happened, than angry. ("How did you even know that...?")

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