I can get pretty fired up sometimes, so I’ve been told.

Back when I was a young whipper-snapper I worked at a company called Wall Data.  This was back before the Internet was used as a business application and Wall Data was a software company that provided desktop PC connection back to the Mainframe or the AS/400.  

I was a call center manager.  I had a staff of 6 fielding incoming calls of about 600 each day, from all over the world.  Most of these folks calling in were responding to some form of advertising that Wall Data had done – either a trade show, a direct mail piece, a magazine ad, you get the idea.  One of the first things my staff was supposed to do was to get the caller to tell us the code on the mail piece or the code in the ad – there was always a four digit indicator that would tell us what made the phone ring today.  Never mind if the caller was a customer or if it was someone who couldn’t recall, we were to do the best we could to find out. That four digit code was priority number 1.  

One day the phone was ringing off the freaking hook and we had 100x as many calls in the queue as normal.  I can hardly remember the specifics, but headquarters up in Seattle had announced a huge partnership with Microsoft and sent out a press release and contacted a bunch of enterprise Microsoft partners – and each caller was extremely frustrated with us when we asked how they heard about us.  They also had questions about the announcement that we couldn’t answer.  We didn’t even have an advance copy of the press release.

Now because the call center, based in Palo Alto where the CEO Jim Simpson lived,  was the red-headed step child of the marketing department in Seattle,  (

All of this was taking place at 5am – and these guys were east coast callers.  I got one of the callers to fax me a copy of the press release.  I couldn’t call Seattle yet, no one else was in Palo Alto yet and I was furious, and frantically needing answers.

I called the PR Firm.  It said, and it always says on press releases, for information please contact –

To be continued…