Technical worker (we can conditionally call him a system administrator) accidentally copied vulgar jokes into the prompts for Florida call center employees — and sales managers even read them to their customers.
How tells us The Register, the guy worked in a call center that «sells things people don’t need and then does everything possible to keep them from being returned».
The working application was in Ubuntu and ran on the ViciDial system. The sysadmin edited and updated scripts using information for different campaigns. Sales managers saw the updates in real time and used the prompts to communicate with customers.
As you can guess, this was not the most profitable business, so the system was open source. In addition, there was no test environment – everything happened in production.
As often happens, the guy didn’t have a job and was just surfing the Internet, stumbling upon adult humor sites.
He thought some of the jokes were funny, so he decided to copy them and share them with his friends.
Soon, however, 300 sales managers raised an uproar — the scripts they were reading to potential customers contained specific language that was not conducive to sales.
Somehow, the contents of the clipboard ended up in the variables for ViciDial, and jokes intended for a very limited circle of people became instructions for communicating with customers.
The management, of course, demanded an explanation. And our hero provided them: «Ubuntu sent a response package that forced a script to be read from the wrong NFS, which contained nasty downloads from the previous administrator. How were we supposed to know this guy had all this stuff?»
In the end, he got away with it and avoided dismissal.