So it turns out that I can still be surprised.

I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of things. In the industry vertical I’m in, the same things generally keep happening, so you see the signs and know what to expect, more or less. Mark Twain said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” and that’s an easy enough rubric to apply to your analysis and assessments.

But sometimes something unprecedented happens.

So last week I was up in the far, FAR north of Northern Alberta and Northern British Columbia. You didn’t ask, but it was the longest business road trip — both in duration and distance — I’ve gone on since before COVID. I had the time of my life. It was just like the old days, driving out to places I’d never been, and meeting all brand-new people every day.

Anyway.

I had just gotten to my hotel when I received a call. One of my clients was panicking. There was something wrong with our ordering portal. However, he was having trouble articulating exactly what was wrong with it. I was still in the parking lot, and I calmed him down, and assured him I would log in to the system and see what’s up as soon as I unpacked my laptop in my room, and that I would call him back. I got situated, got online, went to our back end, then looked at the portal.

I then uttered a profanity, followed by “Oh MY!”

My client was right. The ordering portal wasn’t working. And this was an error I had never seen. I’m a trained troubleshooting technician, which actually comes in handy a lot even today. I was able to replicate the error,  but I wasn’t able to understand why it was happening. It was indeed a system error. It was a BIG error. The biggest possible.

It was already end of day back in the time zone our office is in. So I screen-capped everything and forwarded it all to the tech team, detailing the nature of the fault, and documented it. I then talked my client of the ledge, and assured him that tech team would be on it first thing in the morning. He was cool with that.

The next morning, my day started at 6 a.m., walking the head of tech team through the fault, my findings, etc.
And her team swung it into action. I had to drive home, and was going to be in the foothills out of cellphone range for almost three hours. She assured me they would handle it. When I got back into mobile data range, she and her team had fixed it. My client was ecstatic. Solving his problem turned him from a great client to a grateful great client.
I won’t go on and on, but everyone here knows what an eComm portal is, and how a shopping cart works, right?
The easiest way to explain what happened to you readers is the message I dropped into the sales team group chat once we had a happy resolution:

Hey team!
We need to give my client a prize or award of some sort for doing what no one else has ever done:
Reach the theoretical limit of how many line items you need to stuff into your shopping list in order to break it
It’s more than 500 lines, if the rest of you are interested
I sound like I’m joking but I’m not
This is a historic occasion

It was also a fantastic opportunity to flex on the rest of the sales team:

My client placed an order SO BIG it broke the internet. What have all of you been doing?

It was stressful at the time, although I was confident my tech team would save the day. More importantly, we took a bad situation and made it good, and saved an important client from disaster. There is always a silver lining in every storm cloud, and made the best of the worst.